Dave Eggers: Print Will Survive
June 8, 2009, 1:41 am
Posted by Gregory Wolfe
Though we may be working only in pixels here at dotCommonweal, I’m guessing that most of us love the printed magazine and print in general.
As more newspapers fold (so to speak), and other dire bits of news emerge from the world of books, journals, and magazines, it’s easy to get pretty glum.
Nay, apocalyptic.
(Did I say I edit a literary quarterly, which is a type of periodical that last flourished in the Pleistocene Era?)
Anyway, it’s nice when someone tells us worryworts-about-the-survival-of-the-printed-word to snap out of it.
As author Dave Eggers does here.
Eggers’ “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” gave me hope that Young People Today are actually literate and perceptive (not to mention nice looking, though I realize women in late middle age should not notice these things), so if he says print has a future, I’m inclined to be optimistic.
On the other hand, Eggers reassurance sounds more like platitude than business model, and it’s interesting we’re reading that reassurance ONLINE, so …