The recent announcement that Apple’s new iOS 8 for the iPhone and OSX Yosemite for the Mac will render older versions of the hardware obsolete is just another reminder why printed books are so valuable.
It is frustrating the amount of technology that is now antiquated and prevents us from enjoying entertainment that we spent our hard-earned cash on. Sift through any garage of a Baby Boomer, especially one like me that hangs on to everything and you will discover fossils of dinosaurs that can no longer deliver the enjoyment they were once capable of without hard-to-find, functioning equipment that can play them back if they have not already deteriorated to the point of complete uselessness.
Vinyl records, cassette tapes, 8-tracks, Super-8 film, Beta Max, VHS, floppy disks, Zip Drives, game cartridges for the Commodore VIC 20, and discs of games or programs for Windows 98 and Classic Mac OS all collect dust as they waste away, overcome by each new spate of technological advancements.
It is no wonder that there is doubt about digital deliver of things like books, music film and comics because we know that eventually the content that we have purchased will become as useless as all that had gone before and once again we will be repurchasing something in a new format to satisfy the demands of our current technology.
The printed book stands alone as the perfect format. The book and its other printed cousins like newspapers, magazines and comics have withstood the test of time better than any other media.
As frustrated as we may become with the rapid changes is our technology rendering our media and devices useless it is comforting to know that we can stroll over to a shelf and still read our first comic, or our favorite book and it will deliver 100% of the same experience as it did forty or fifty years ago with the same ease. (Though some of us may now need bifocals to achieve that thrill!)
It is an irony that as advancement in technology eventually turns all media into useless bricks it is the most basic format of the printed book that will remain the true brick that builds the permanent foundation that supports everything else.
It is inevitable that my iPhone will be a brick soon, just another cell phone lost in my junk drawer, but my books and collection of comics will always be preserved, ready to deliver full entertainment value at my beckon call as they have for my entire life. Print deserves more praise than it gets, but it will always get it from me for it truly is the King of the Dinosaurs simply for its ability to survive and avoid extinction.
Making Comics Because We Want to,
Gerry Giovinco
A true, capitalism-endorsing conservative would let the market decide.