Why blogs will be the end of Business 2.0 as we know it (part 1)

Much has been made of the end of print and I'm not going to rehash it all. But here's a simplistic outline:

1. Printing is expensive, making paper is expensive and polluting, and shipping paper you printed something on is expensive, polluting, and slow.
2. Soon everyone will have super-fast wireless internet all the time forever.
3. Economics will dictate that we all stop printing entirely and put everything on the internet.

The argument against it goes something like this:

1. Books are warm and cuddly, computers are not.
2. Books don't need batteries, they're cheap and sturdy, and printed pages look better than any screen.
3. And besides, everyone's been reading books all their lives and they're not going to stop now.

Both arguments have good points but both are myopic (that's right, I have a black belt in knocking down strawmen). The pro end-of-print contingent seems to think that a superior medium will completely and inevitably supplant the previous medium. While it's true that you don't see many wax cylinders these days and the telegram just went extinct, there are many media that learned to adjust to their new niches. Film did not supplant theater, broadcast TV did not supplant film, videotapes did not supplant broadcast TV, and radio has survived it all. (Video did not kill the radio star, it just made the radio star into Rush Limbaugh.)

Meanwhile the pro-book contingent suffers from a lack of imagination on this topic:

"A book, you don't need to plug it in, it's very convenient. Also people are very comfortable with it," says best-selling Canadian author Margaret Atwood. She believes that the printed book is here to stay, "they will. Trust me on this."

She seems to be forgetting that there's a whole crop of children who have never known life without the internet. They've grown up with mp3 players, cell phones, and GameBoys clutched in their sweaty paws. They'll switch to e-Books with no problem when the time comes (and remember to plug them in).

But where does this leave magazines? Swarming onto the net, or clinging to dead trees? Find out after the jump.

I would like to posit that there are two different kinds of magazine (though not just two): the informational magazine and the experiential magazine. (See Table 1.)