A new era, inevitably, has dawned.  Newsweek will officially stop publication of its printed edition at the end of this year, presumably to focus on its online content:

money.cnn.com/2012/10/18/news/companies/newsweek-print-edition/index.html

There was a time I used to get the newspapers delivered to my door every day.  There was a time I would eagerly head over to the bookstore to look over the latest magazines and books.

No longer.

When I heard the mega-bookstore Borders was in danger of being shut down, I was very saddened.  I spent so much time in my local Borders store looking over the latest books as well as magazines and DVDs.  However, by the time the store eventually shut its doors, things had changed considerably and realized I was no longer visiting the place anywhere near as often as I did before.

Why?

The internet.  The fact of the matter is that you can find many fascinating magazine quality articles online, including those of Newsweek itself, online.  There’s CNN, NBC, Salon, Slate, The Huffington Post, Time Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, etc. etc. readily available and updated on a daily, sometimes hourly basis on your computer.

Likewise, any (and seemingly just about all!) books I want are readily available either for download or for ordering a physical copy via Amazon.com and other book sellers.  At the time of Borders’ closing, I was buying cheap copies of used books I wanted through Amazon and receiving the orders relatively quickly…in a matter of, at most, a week.  Very convenient and, unlike Borders, I knew the books were available and didn’t have to drive to the store to check if they had them.

Still, there is a certain sadness with seeing a publication with such a long history (Newsweek first appeared in 1933) leaving the printed edition market that it originated in.

The other day, a relative of mine had a garage sale and my wife decided it was time I unloaded about half of my CD collection.  I’ve been buying CDs since the mid-1980’s but have long since stopped using them.  I have my entire music library on my computer and any new music purchases are done online so getting rid of the CDs wasn’t something I found hard to do.

When people showed up to the garage sale and saw the CDs, they dived into them and bought just about all (I guess my musical taste was popular to those clients!).  One of them, however, made a note of how “outdated” the CD technology was.

One day, I suppose the idea of seeing things on paper, other than titles and legal documents, might also become outdated.