Stephen King, the author, took umbrage last week when the internet-only serialisation of his new horror novel, The Plant, attracted only 41,000 customers on its first day instead of 500,000 as he had hoped for.
The rest of the world can rejoice in the underlying message: it will be a long time, if at all, before the web puts the printed word out of business. The web is brilliant for getting information fast. But the more we do it, the more we appreciate the pleasure of reading a novel in a relaxed way or browsing (true browsing, not its electronic counterfeit) through a magazine or newspaper.
The publisher of Wired, the US magazine which reports on the culture of the web, once received an email from someone who had read the entire contents of the magazine online and felt guilty about it. He wanted to pay the company, but the publisher replied: "If you can read all the contents of Wired online, you deserve to have it free."
If you ever have any doubts about this, go into your local W H Smith and look at the computer and internet magazines: big, fat, expensive and eagerly bought by the people most used to working online.
Even the internet magazines dedicated to web life that can be much more efficiently read online - because they contain hypertext links - are read offline. And that includes a hefty tome called UK.Directory whose 260 pages consist almost entirely of web addresses: perfect, you would have thought, for reading on the web - but no, the geeks prefer to read it in magazine format.
Another subject tailor-made for the web is planning to get married. The internet has lots of sites offering to do everything from planning dresses to organising the catering and presents list.
Has this put bridal magazines out of business yet? Not quite. According to Guinness World Records, a recent Brides magazine had a world record 1,080 pages of advertising to accompany 190 pages of editorial.
According to a report by Christopher Gasson on Britain's publishing industry, (Bookseller Publications), it is possible that more will be published on the web during the next three years than has been published in print since the invention of the printing press 600 years ago.
Yet the book market, far from being destroyed, is still expanding (helped, it must be said, by online sales companies such as Amazon.com). The same is true of the print machinery industry. While sales of conventional presses used to print products like books and labelling will go up by a modest 1% to 2%, the growth of internet-related printing is expected to grow by 15% annually for at least the next five years. No one talks much these days about the death of paper.
Some newspapers have lost readers to the web but this is mainly the sort of person who dipped into the paper rather than read it for pleasure. The web is great for eclectic reading, sampling or receiving breaking news - which is why Wap (wireless application protocol) phones will be a big carrier of news (and goodness knows what else) in future.
Newspaper people still presume it is written somewhere in cyberspace on tablets of code that recruitment advertising will sooner or later migrate to the web. It might - but there are signs that the principle of opposite effect may be working here as well.
Just as new technology newspapers failed to oust traditional ones (because they saw the apocalypse ahead and took remedial action), so traditional newspapers are fighting back against the internet.
They are selling advertisements across several different platforms - web, internet phones and multiple sections of the newspaper - to provide blanket cross-media coverage.
They are also realising that the people who responded to job ads in the newspapers weren't necessarily looking for a job at the time - so - they would not have been using web search engines in the first place.
Internet start ups are starting to fall by the wayside- Clickmango is the latest. This is partly because they misunderstood the nature of the net but partly also because old economy companies realised their underlying strengths - like branding, delivery and knowing their markets. To them, the web is an extra way of selling goods; to web start ups, it is all they have got.
Just as old economy companies have been reclaiming territory, so old media companies are beginning to devour the new medium by embracing its core strengths. The possibilities offered to newspapers and magazines by web phones, for instance, are awesome.
The underlying strengths of the printed media may change when a really user friendly electronic book is devised or, more likely, when electronic paper arrives. This will look like a newspaper and read like paper but the print will arrive by wireless and the whole page folded into your pocket. It will then be left to linguistic philosophers to decide whether this is a case of new media triumphing - or old media adapting once again.
