The visionary in me started to barber on about paradigm shifts, participative texts and global communities, but old Mal was dissatisfied. He didn't want the big picture, he was after the practical reality. But more than anything else, it's cheap as dirt. It costs less than a buck to press a CD-ROM and just pennies to publish a page on the World Wide Web.
New media challenges the economic assumptions of the graphic communications business.
It's a world without economies of scale, a world with very few really big pieces of capital equipment, a world where the creator is closer to the reader than ever before. Early CD-ROMs cost too much because the equipment to make them was expensive. As the technology has matured, prices have come down dramatically. Disk pricing, marketing and distribution ideas have come down to earth, as well. This is bad news for printers, among others.