Print Reincarnated

Richard Sarnoff and William C. Weiss who laugh at being characterized as “the suits.”Sarnoff and Weiss Digital reading goes on today, and in Japan, for example, the best-sellers are cellphone novels. There is no such thing as a print publisher today vs. digital publisher.

Sarnoff: Takes issues with some storytelling comments from previous session. Book industry has been pretty stable because of “act of mental imagination” in reading a book which is different than interacting in vid games, blogs, etc. Book length storytelling will continue in our society and “be part of a national cultural dialogue.”

Weiss: Maybe we are looking for the “next media” not the new media or digital media as an end, but simply a transisiton to more media choices altogether.

Sarnoff: Is access or content king? Well, the customer is God, so whatever the customer needs is prime.

Weiss: Second Life, CNN iReport are going interactive in very interesting ways.

Sarnoff: Music is not dead. It just isn’t being paid. But a new economic model for music business could change that. The econ shift has been to live performances as the profit unit. What will music industry do to move with the media transformation?

Weiss: Reformation with print — look at Nikei in Japan — they drive the reader to print product via mobile news. Folks use mobile as they commute and then read when they get home in print, but they read the print in a more focused way.

Sarnoff: Mentioned history of TV (the Farnsworth play) and how it was initially seen as great tool of education, but the ad model caused the morph into the “amusing ourselves to death” engine

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