Technology Marches On - The Declining Publishing Industry

Right, I keep forgetting about this thing. Here's what should be my seventh post. And here is an article on the declining magazine industry.

Technological progress is a game-changer. Much innovation consists not just gadgets, but the streamlining of an otherwise inefficient system. This is great for the consumer, and rather unfortunate for whoever just found themselves with a superfluous job. As industrial machinery progressed, fewer and fewer untrained laborers could produce more and more. Today the Internet provides a new paradigm, one that increasingly renders traditional print sources obsolete. What's more, the prominent news sources are often more likely to receive online readership than the local ones. As such, we have seen traditional print media suffering as newspaper and magazine readers turn to their computers.

As much as I'd like to see the trash that is the average popular magazine disappear, it's more likely that many will succeed in changing their format. It will be some time before print magazines entirely disappear, if ever, but technological progress is set to make them increasingly irrelevant. Most notably, electronic paper. The next few generations of products such as the Amazon Kindle are likely to revolutionize the publishing industry.

What do you think of the economic incentives and disincentives of this process? What other technologies do you think will transform traditional business practices in the foreseeable future?