Vol. 6, No. 11, November 1995

Ink vs. bits

Could a couple of teenagers with ISDN put you out of business?

Most of us come to this business firmly rooted in print.

Editors of my acquaintance have proudly rolled up shirtsleeves to show the scars left by flying hot lead that escaped Linotype machines oh so long ago.

For me, the smell of a print shop -- the ink, the solvent, the ozone of an arc-light plate burner -- brings an instant homey feeling.

So it’s sometimes difficult to comprehend that publishing is in the process of rapid change that will make printing only one of the many ways we get information to the public.

That became readily apparent in the days and weeks following Seybold San Francisco, the annual publishing technology conference held Sept. 26-29.

Actually, the grumbling started at the meeting, with clusters of graybeards bemoaning the conference’s lack of emphasis on print-based issues and the glorification of new media -- specifically, the Internet and the World-Wide Web.

Seybold organizers acknowledged the mutterings, but said they'd seen it before -- when the conference swung away from addressing issues about proprietary systems and toward issues about integrating off-the-shelf hardware and software into the publishing process.

I think, though, that this is a more fundamental change (dare I say sea change?). We're at the point where editors and publishers have to start thinking about information distribution in an entirely new manner -- not just whether they're using an Atex terminal or a PC.

Yes, the new Web-based products (or CD-ROM products, or fax-on-demand products) aren't making money right now, but how do you learn how to make money in these media if you aren't making educational investments today?

Could a couple of teenagers in a bedroom with a computer and an Isdn line put you out of business?

It’s a question of ink versus bits.

Inside, you'll find my report on the Seybold conference, wherein the debate of ink versus bits raged -- sometimes unwittingly.

Also inside is Correspondent George Powell’s look at the Seybold trade show. With more than 300 exhibits, it was an impossibly broad event to cover, but Powell ferreted out the really important products and offers his opinions of them.

While wandering the trade show floor, I encountered Iota Industries Ltd. of Israel. You may remember these folks -- we splashed them all over the cover of The Cole Papers back in September 1994.

Iota had shown a revolutionary text-recognition system at NEXPO ’94 that could be used to build electronic archives of newspaper pages from a variety of sources, including microfilm.

Correspondent John Bryan, who discovered Iota last year, has revisited the company and its product line to determine where it has gone in the last year -- and whether trying to turn microfilms of newspaper pages into archives is such a hot idea.

Coming down on the bits side of the ink vs. bits debate, Correspondent Chris Feola reviews the latest bulletin board system (BBS) software from Galacticomm.

Feola’s main point is that the new World Group software -- which not only supports BBS activities, but also Internet stuff like File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and the Web -- is a true client/server system, with clients that will run on virtually any type of computer, including ancient Apple IIs and CP/M-based machines.

In recent weeks, I've had two conversations that put the ink vs. bits debate in sharp detail.

In one, over a nice meal in a restaurant, I listened to a former colleague from my newspaper days expressing his disdain for the changes the newspaper business has undergone in the last few years.

In sum, he said, "It just isn't fun anymore."

In another conversation, carried out over the Internet, a fellow I knew in college explained the rush of getting to scoop his own print-based newspaper by uploading a breaking story onto the Web.

In sum, he said, "This is fun."

And that may be the deciding vote -- what’s fun and what isn't.

-- David M. Cole

Also see Hellbox

From THE COLE PAPERS, November 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved.