Atoms to Bits

More and more content is being converted from both physical or non-digital formats to digital ones for easier distribution online.

An advertisement about Amazon's free Reading Apps that can be used by various types of digital

Amazon’s multiscreen Kindle strategy has created an attractive and viable platform for digital distribution of print media, enabling readers to access the same content on most major personal devices, and maintain continuity of experience.

The emergence of both convergent (smartphone, PCs, tablets) and specialized devices to store and play digital media has driven the digitization of billions of bytes of physical and analog media into digital form, adding hundreds of thousands of new articles, songs, chapters and episodes to digital libraries and stores. As described in Chris Anderson’s blog and book by the same name, The Long Tail, digital formats open up vast new niche markets interested in narrow topics or little-known artists, creating a boon for digital media producers.

Signals:

Movie and TV production studios have been steadily adding to back catalogs of available digital versions of their properties as the main aggregators and distributors of digital video have stabilized. Major digital distributors such as iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and Hulu have grown substantially as online video content consumption has accelerated growth, creating a more viable business case for direct-to-online release.
With the emergence of the blockbuster Amazon Kindle e-reader platform, e-book libraries have swollen to meet demand for both current bestsellers and back catalogs of publishers. One estimate at the beginning of 2010 put the number of e-book titles available at around 10 million, including 500,000 made available as public domain by Google.
While most major magazines and newspapers have been available via the Web for the past decade, the advent of tablets such as Apple’s iPad, as well as larger format e-readers, has magazine publishers rethinking how they adapt their content, advertising and overall format to the similar form factor of these devices. Wired, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian and several other high profile global titles are trying different design innovations to appeal to their reader base, an increasing percentage of which is mobile and armed with these devices.

Implications:

The shift from physical presentation to digital delivery is putting pressure on traditionally successful titles to innovate in areas they are not yet fully familiar with, giving the lead to those which are able to define the online reading or viewing experience early.
Deeper interactive integration will be necessary to take advantage of the benefits of connected, powerful, high-resolution devices. As with the Web, digital reading, in particular, opens avenues for integration of multimedia, within certain constraints.
Marketing and promotion abilities afforded by physical retail and distribution are vastly diminished in a direct-to-digital space. With little additional “real estate,” new forms of marketing, such as sample chapters, limited downloads and other “taster” versions of media will need to be created to catch the digital consumer’s attention.

Countertrends:

With the rush to digital formats, countertrends to digitization are not strong at present. Some new development in the area of limited-run or specialist print media is happening, but even these are often leveraging digital tie-ins.

Extrapolations:

Already several large newspapers in North America have ceased physical publication but continued life as digital media. It is possible that, within two decades, most analog and physical media delivery will be replaced with all-digital delivery on demand, as many of the infrastructural pieces already exist.