Back to the future

By Sarah Horton on March 24, 2009 8:36 PM | No Comments

I am fascinated by the Clay Shirkey post, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. He writes about how the publishing industry is in the midst of a revolution, with the old model of publishing overturned by the Internet.

"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves - the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public - has stopped being a problem."

Pat and I have been navigating the world between print and online for some time now. In fact, Web Style Guide began its life as a website, and only later became a book that was available online in pretty much the same format as on paper. Now, with this edition, we are exploring ways to leverage the attributes of online communications, such as the two-way dialogue afforded by this blog. But we still post the entire contents of the book online, free of charge.

We are clearly in the midst of a major paradigm shift, and I suppose the next edition of Web Style Guide may be go back to being entirely online, but in a form that we haven't yet imagined.