I have no particular faith in the longevity of printed periodicals, but that hardly means that print itself has no future. A number of niche projects and some forthcoming devices indicate that printed products should maintain great value as objects, rather than mere purveyors of info.
For instance, there’s this Instaprint Kickstarter project that gets my small contribution, a great opportunity to crowdsource photography at events, with a nod toward the instant photo booths of old. This comes on the heels of the Little Printer from Berg Cloud, which aggregates your social media into something resembling stylish receipts.
And over in the web design niche, there’s an interesting movement with classy, high design books that discuss this very digital profession in analog format. While there’s no shortage of physical instructional books, most of those have a short shelf life before the content is out of date. But series such as The Manual and Smashing aim to be permanent artifacts for the bookshelf – collectibles really – of a small but dedicated audience.