In 1995, Designer David Carson published a book titled “The End of Print.” Print wasn’t really over, David had just significantly stirred the pot, at least graphically. Print itself had a few years left. But the internet had arrived.

It’s 2010, and print publishers would like you to believe that print isn’t dying, but it is. A recent report from mediaIDEAS says ” “Over the next 10 years, the magazine industry will experience deep-rooted change from primarily a print-oriented business to one where digital products will represent the largest share of a smaller periodical industry. We expect digital to be the primary source of revenue for magazines past the 2016-2017 time frame.”

Digital is expected to increase from making up 1/3 of the periodical industry in 2009, to roughly 75% in the coming years. Death doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It can represent a positive evolution. This is post isn’t about re-hashing a tired subject — it’s about the other side of the coin. The Digital side.

I started as a magazine guy. I don’t think print is at it’s at it’s point of extinction, but let’s face it, we’re in a time of drastic change, and save for a few in-denial print editors, it’s no secret.. What used to be a high frequency news medium will need to evolve into low frequency (semi-annual or annual) feature based publications (more akin to a coffee table books) if print is to survive. Some have already gone this route. Others have gone out of business. Others are grasping at straws.

Print-on-demand might be a great way to go about this. Solutions for this already exist — MagCloud is one example. With this model, ad buyers could quantify impressions much like they do online. Print circulations have long been fudged/inflated (they are online as well). I’ve personally seen them inflated more than 200% and sold as such, but print-on-demand could lead to actual readership data that would be more valuable to marketers than inflated, confusing guestimates. And more importantly waste would be drastically reduced.

We ceased publishing the last magazine I was involved with in 2007, upon the realization that the time had come that we weren’t doing anything we couldn’t do more effectively online. It was cheaper, more timely, and created less landfill. Design on the web was more consistent with CSS, content management systems made updates instant, and more importantly high-speed internet was no longer a rarity.

Each year in America, 2 billion magazines (62 percent what gets printed), ends up unsold and in landfills. If you’re not a mathematician, that’s nearly 3 out of 4 printed. That doesn’t count the waste created by units people actually buy (yes, sometimes that still happens). The number of magazines saved by collectors and libraries aren’t significant in the scheme of things. The best estimates by experts of all-things-Green say that only 60% of paper gets recycled. I don’t consider myself an environmentalist, or an overly Green individual, but it doesn’t take a scientist to see that all that paper might be unnecessary.

Magazine Publishers are in scramble mode. They aren’t quite sure how to monetize the digital age. As a last gasp, they’ve taken out a print ad campaign, touting the virtues of print (to people that still read print). Brilliant. They note that print still has 300 million paid subscribers (so if you adjust for inflation it’s likely more like 150 million). What they fail to point out is that the Internet has 1.8 Billion users. Latin America has as many Internet users as print has paid subscribers. And Internet numbers are quantifiable. The Internet is a much larger audience, and if they would accept it, they could do great things with it.

Publishers like Bonnier have recently been hyping up statistics / print numbers that on the surface look really great. Transworld Business, a Bonnier-owned publication actually just posted some of these numbers today under the title “Magazines Aren’t Dying; Read the Truth.” Again, on the surface you’d think wow, things are on the up and up. While they didn’t take it out and try to hide it, they also didn’t exactly point out that those numbers are from 2008. A lot has changed since 2008 in the digital world. Unfortunately the Magazine Publishers of America, the organization that generated the data Transworld highlights hasn’t updated their numbers since releasing its 2009 kit (thus 2008 data). Oops. In fact, TransWorld quietly killed off one of it’s own publications (Quad) in 2009. I guess there is some fitting irony that a print publisher would publish these numbers on the internet to save print, roughly a year and a half after the numbers were released.

2008 this is not. The Magazine Publishers of America, in fact, just added a Digital section to its Web Site to help transitioning Publishers adjust to the coming digital age. They clearly understand the change. Hopefully their members will soon.