Rick Smolan Quotes

At present, however, I don't think the Net is a very good medium for books, books should really be inexpensive lightweight paperbacks you can bang around.

In a way, publishing in 2005 was similar to publishing in 1950. Nobody kept blogs; that was still optional. I didn't even have a website then.

I do think that the kind of writing that I do will always be around and printed in books, magazines, and now blogs.

I had been reading magazines a lot, and I love magazines, and so I was always asking myself why is it that these gorgeous articles just don't translate well to the web? Presentation was one aspect of it.

Paper publishers are doing everything they can to slow the transition to eBooks because, in a digital world, paper publishers' high hardback margins essentially disappear.

There's almost no author alive who isn't weathering the tumultuous changes in the publishing industry.

I worked at Salon.com way back when they started, and there's just unmeasurable value to distributing words online, too, but I still get my news from the newspaper in the morning.

I think newspapers shouldn't try to compete directly with the Web, and should do what they can do better, which may be long-form journalism and using photos and art, and making connections with large-form graphics and really enhancing the tactile experience of paper.

Newspapers are the engines that drive the Web.

The Big Five publishing companies are dinosaurs trying to survive in a post-meteor world. They won't.

I think that the Internet and print behave in a complementary manner.

There is a lot of talk in publishing these days that we need to become more like the Internet: We need to make books for short attention spans with bells and whistles - books, in short, that are as much like 'Angry Birds' as possible. But I think that's a terrible idea.

Anything remotely resembling news media is going to continue to migrate online until very little or none of it is produced on dead trees.

State intervention in the literary realm went far beyond the blue-penciling of texts. It extended to the shaping of literature itself as a force at work throughout the social order. If states wielded such power in the age of print, what will restrain them from abusing it in the age of the Internet?

The publishing industry provides a viable channel which enables a wide distribution of books that we're not seeing in any other way. Unfortunately, self-publishing doesn't have that.

More and more readers are finding important and interesting content through platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and now Medium rather than traditional publishers.

For me, the most painful thing is the thought of shelves without books. This is the problem with the digital thing. I do not want to see it on electronic. I do not want to see all of those indices on Kindle. I don't want this physical object to disappear, because when it's there and it's present, it's continually suggesting new relationships in a way that an electronic index couldn't.

A magazine is so much more beautiful than what's online.

The Internet will make every enterprise a publisher.

Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.

Digital doesn't interest me. It's too many steps removed from the actual tactile thing. I still read books. I don't read online.

I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.

Having done quite a bit with studios and networks, I thought if I'm going to do something new and unformed, it would be fun to do it in a completely new space and place. The space being the Internet and the place being Crackle.

Magazines in the traditional sense were aggregators of novelty. A good magazine was a lot of novelty, stuff you've never heard of before, clearly aggregated by people who have been able to travel further and dig deeper than you have been able to do. And that used to be really an important source of stuff for me. And now it is less important because the Internet has eaten it all up. But my Twitter feed as an aggregator of novelty is like... I don't know what I would do if it became any more powerful, I would have to start reining it in somehow.

I had a book come out several years ago, when there were no blogs. This is a mark to me about how the environment has changed.