At the beginning of 2021, I noticed that the publication period of many newspapers and periodicals subscribed by the unit was adjusted, for example, the Beijing News was adjusted from a daily journal to a monday to Friday, and it was closed on statutory holidays. The reason for subscribing to the Beijing News is that the newspaper that was previously subscribed to stopped selling paper editions in early 2019.
In recent years, the traditional publishing industry has been like a gray-headed and dirty face image of "eating the last meal without eating the next meal". In the face of the huge impact of digital publications and the decline in print media sales, most of the traditional publishing industry has begun to turn online, and a small number of offline bookstores have tried to "save themselves" - transform book cafes and find new empowerment channels. Readers, on the other hand, enjoy the convenience of electronic reading while nostalgic for the ease of ink and paper.
Offline bookstores transform bookstores and find new enabling channels| Pixabay
Although traditional publications and digital publications have their own advantages and have their own consumer groups, but everyone's attention and time (flow) are so much, the two share a piece of cake, competition is inevitable, and victory or defeat is a common thing.
The same is true of the facts. On April 16, 2021, the 7th China Digital Reading Conference released the 2020 China Digital Reading Report. The "Report" shows that in 2020, the scale of China's digital reading industry reached 35.16 billion yuan, with a growth rate of 21.8%; the scale of digital reading users nationwide reached 494 million, an increase of 5.56% over 2019, the per capita e-book reading volume was 9.1, the per capita audiobook reading volume was 6.3, and the per capita digital reading volume of e-books + audiobooks increased by 5.5% compared with 2019. At the same time, the number of paper books per capita read in 2020 was 6.2, a decrease of 2.6 books compared with 2019.
We know that traditional publications mainly include newspapers, magazines and books, that is, physical print. So, what is a digital publication? A digital publication is a publication in which "all information is stored in optical, magnetic and other media in the digital form of a unified binary code, and the processing and transmission of information is carried out by means of computers or similar devices throughout the process of publication." In addition to the different media carrying the content, it is easy to carry and read, and the content of digital publications is also more abundant, such as e-books, online novels, network maps, digital music, online animation, online games and so on.
With the power of electronic devices such as computers, digital publications have also taken a qualitative leap forward in the "reading" experience. For example, you can insert videos in electronic magazines, traditional static pictures can be turned into GIFs, videos; you can voice-evoked navigation in the network map software, even if you can't understand the map, you are not afraid of getting lost; for example, you only need a mobile phone to easily carry thousands of e-books, and each book can automatically record the reading progress.
The earliest budding of digital publications can be traced back to 1961, the American Chemical Abstracts Service's "Chemical Bibliography", computer compilation, computer reading, belongs to the recognized prototype of electronic publications. China's digital publishing began with the famous "748 Project". In August 1974, the mainland set up the national key scientific and technological research project "Chinese character information processing system project", referred to as "748 Project". Mr. Wang Xuan of Peking University completed the development of laser illumination technology, and used mathematical methods to derive a set of recursive formulas, which cleverly restored the compressed Chinese character information into glyphs at high speed, laying a solid foundation for the design of laser illumination controllers. Since then, China has continued to advance in the digital publishing technology route, and gradually completed the research and development and introduction of color illumination technology, magnetic storage technology, optical storage technology, and computer typesetting technology.
Sculpture of Wang Xuan and Chen Kunluan, collection of Wuxi Museum
Wikipedia Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
Today, the carrier of digital publications covers more possibilities, including mobile phones, computers, various types of Pads, e-readers, etc. The advantages of digital publications with electronic products as the carrier are obvious, that is, convenient, easy to carry, convenient to store, convenient to search, convenient to record, convenient to share...
In addition to convenience, the price advantage of publications that have been freed from paper printing is also obvious. The price of each traditional publication includes the cost of printing paper and ink. Digital publications, on the other hand, do not have this hard cost, and their prices are often incredibly low. For example, a set of Liu Cixin's science fiction book "Three-Body Problem", the official price should be about 150 yuan; in the Kindle store, as long as 40 yuan can achieve full-text download; in the WeChat reading software, you can even do tasks to achieve free full-text download.
In the context of fast reading, there are at least two reasons that have seriously affected the sales of traditional publications. First, the workflow of the traditional publishing industry is too lengthy: author-publisher-publisher-reader, such a process is almost difficult to achieve smooth feedback. The web greatly simplifies this process and becomes a direct interaction between the author and the reader. The second is the speed of book content updates and the revision of versions. Traditional books have a long cycle, and after the publication is put on the market, whether it is adjusted or updated according to market feedback. This not only involves huge human, financial and material resources, but also the adjustment cycle needs to wait. Online literature websites have brought a whole new change to reading. Starting point Chinese Network, Jinjiang Literature Network, Magic Sword Book Alliance and a series of online literary websites have risen rapidly, and even began to rush out of the country, becoming an important medium for the international dissemination of Chinese culture.
Due to the limited content of offline paper physical prints and the profit margins are not as good as digital publications, the electronic reading experience is becoming more and more perfect, and the discourse power and influence based on traditional publications are gradually flowing to digital publications, and the operating situation of traditional publications can be described as walking on thin ice.
But do digital publications have only a vicious impact on traditional publications? Nor is it true that digital publications bring new approaches to the long-term preservation of traditional publications. Thanks to new technologies, the rise of digital publication reading methods has also promoted the innovation of traditional publication preservation methods. For example, the sixth edition of the Modern Chinese Dictionary weighs 1.3 kilograms, while the modern Chinese Dictionary's mobile applications account for just over 100 megabytes of memory. Digital publications can not only compress storage space, but also allow precious publications to have the ability to "protect themselves" and "heal themselves" when encountering natural and man-made disasters, which is convenient for the protection and circulation of related cultural relics.
E-readers and traditional book | Pixabay
And it is indisputable that digital publications cannot completely replace traditional publications. Whether it is credibility, authority or deep thinking, the influence of traditional publications is incomparable. Humans invented paper out of the need and motivation to better record ideas. People invented the printing press because of the desire to spread ideas on a large scale. Therefore, if we one-sidedly emphasize the advantages of digital publications and do not understand traditional publications from the height of profundity, it is easy to ignore the fact that traditional publications are ideologically indelible.
In the digital age, we have more and more choice of media, which is not only for publications, but also for the trend of reader personality development throughout the digital age. Today, in the 5G era, you and I are both communicators and recipients, which changes the situation dominated by communicators in the traditional mass communication process, making the communication process more equal, and this equality will inevitably bring equality to social relations, which has a far-reaching impact.
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Author: Yue Xiaohong
Editor: Han Yueyang
Source: Guangming Network