If you study the history of media, you see very quickly that they always go to war against each other. Accompanying each new media technology’s adaption curve is a decline for another. So as magazines, newspapers, radio, TV and now the Internet vie for attention, each borrows and steals from each other until, as is the case with convergence media, they start to blend together. Obviously each has its strength and weakness, and in the current battlefield, the Internet seems to be outpacing newspapers very rapidly. If you are a media manager or company owner, your motto should be adapt or die.

So what will the future of magazines be? The New York Observer ponders the question and you may be surprised by the results. I’m still pretty old school, so I happen to like holding a thing– a magazine, paper or book– and not to worry about whether or not I lose or damage it. I like rolling up a magazine and sticking it in my pocket or making coffee stained rings on the paper. At the same time, I hate paying thousands of dollars to ship my library across the ocean. If only books could pay rent!

Kindle? Well, the DRM is an issue, and honestly, I cannot think of a different way of browsing a book than running my thumb down its trimmed edge to catch a page by surprise. I also have a mania of buying my own books (as opposed to borrowing or checking them out) because I am lost if I cannot underline or scribble notes in the margin. I know Kindle allows you to highlight text and to write notes, but it looks too slow for me. However, if there is a way to copy and past the highlighted text from a Kindle book into a word processor, then that would make its features more interesting (maybe it can do that– I don’t know for sure). Then there’s the cost. Geez, I really don’t want to spend a large stash of money for something that will be outdated in a year. I’m already smarting from how rapidly my iPod has become obsolete.

Anyhow, read on. If you are a media watcher, I think you’ll like the piece.

Where Will Magazines Be Ten Years From Now? | The New York Observer:

In the next five years in Graydon Carter’s world, you’ll walk onto a plane, or a subway, or a soon-to-be-invented mode of transport, and you’ll tuck a little electronic book under your arm. Inside that little book, which will be very expensive at first but soon will cost $150, there’ll be a series of mylar “pages,” and there will be small buttons off to the side, and once you hit one of them, whoooosh, words and photos from Vanity Fair will suddenly appear.

“You’ll subscribe to five magazines and six newspapers,” Mr. Carter said. “That is what I see as the future. … That I know is coming.”

“Ultimately, there will be some sort of device!” said Peter Meirs, the vice president of production technology at Time Inc.

“In a decade time frame?” asked Chris Anderson, editor of Wired. “No. Technology adoption happens slowly. This is the editor of Wired telling you no. Obviously, newspapers are going to be changing dramatically over the next few years, but magazines are not newspapers. And I think magazines 10 years from now are going to look something like they do now.”