An visual chart in the current Newsweek sums up many of the changes we have seen over the past decade:
Exactly How Much Are The Times A-Changin’?
The categories that are in decline speak volumes:
- The US Postal Service is seeing a decline of 15% in mail deliveries. Since much of their service is “fixed” (i.e. daily home delivery, regular blue box pickup), this trend will translate into an increased cost per letter.
- Newspapers are still struggling to find ways to adapt. Many are taking an irrational track by attempting to limit services like Google News from crawling their sites. The ironic part of this is that they could simply set up a Robots.txt file that would stop Google from indexing their news pages. They want it both ways, apparently.
- CD Sales are declining. Easy legal downloads and a plethora of streaming services are providing music publishers with happy customers and new revenue streams. They have stopped fighting against the revolution.
Otherwise, only two things stand out. Commenting on the clowns statistic is beyond the scope of my expertise, but I have to say that the books stat is impressive. We have more than tripled the number of published books. I wonder how many are print-on-demand vs. traditional publishing, and whether e-books are counted in the total (and whether they count in addition to the printed edition).
Oh, and if you have ever wanted to be a reality tv star, go ahead and claim that you are. With 320 shows, who could prove you wrong?
found via Stephen’s Lighthouse
