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"Digital marketer" Steve Rubel has declared that by January 2014, that is, five years from now,

almost all forms of tangible media will either be in sharp decline or completely extinct. I am not just talking about print, but all tangible forms of media - newspapers, magazines, books, DVDs, boxed software and video games. [Emphasis in original.]

A poll of his readers didn't support his optimism - and I use the word deliberately as he seems positively giddy at the future he sees, not surprising considering his job. Asked "In the US when will tangible media become extinct?" nearly 37% of those who responded said "Never, you're crazy." Only 15% agreed with his timetable. However, another 40% say while it won't happen by 2014, it will happen by 2040. (A final 8% answered "Not soon enough" which while indicating eagerness, says nothing about how long this process will take.)

The main objection of the naysayers was to the idea of books disappearing. Other forms, especially music and video, seemed more up for grabs.

Leaving those aside, it certainly is true that forms of print media other than books are facing difficulties. Indeed, what prompted this post was the fact that I was in a bookstore recently, looking at a reasonably good selection of magazines, when I noticed an announcement on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists saying that this issue was the last print issue - it was going strictly digital. A check of the inside front cover confirmed it: Due to the continuing rise in the Three Ps that are the bane of any publication - the costs of paper, printing, and postage - BAS would only be available online from now on. And that carries an implication that goes beyond the economic one.

That's not the only example: The Christian Science Monitor has announced plans to go all-digital come April for the same reasons: declining subscriptions and rising costs.

And last week came the news that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is being sold - and if there are no buyers within 60 days, the 145 year-old paper will either be shut down or go web-only.

"One thing is clear: at the end of the sale process, we do not see ourselves publishing in print," Steven Swartz, president of the Hearst Corp.'s newspaper division, said in a Web story.

Newspapers across the country are looking for ways to cut costs everywhere they can in attempts to stay afloat. Newspapers are entering into joint operating agreements, or JOAs, with other papers, where they have separate editorial staffs but operate production and distribution jointly. On another front, Jim Hightower notes that the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News are cutting back on home delivery to three days a week.

And while that is a serious concern, it also serves to bring me back to the point I wanted to make. In reporting on the Detroit papers' decision, CNN said the

[p]apers will be on newsstands every day, and the papers' online offerings will be expanded, [David Hunke, publisher of the Free Press and CEO of a JOA between the Free Press and the News] said. ...

Paying for delivery vehicles to cover 300,000 miles nightly, he said, did not make economic sense at a time when 63 percent of readers have broadband Internet access.

But if 63% of readers have broadband access, that means 37% - more than a third - do not. Nationwide, the figure is even higher. According to a July 2008 report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, some 55% of American adults have high-speed internet access. Which means that 45% do not. What's more,

for poor Americans, as well as African Americans, broadband adoption was slow or negative.

Among adults living in households with annual incomes of less than $20,000 annually, broadband adoption has actually regressed: the percentage dropped from 28 percent in March 2007 to 25 percent in April/May 2008, said the report.

Among African Americans, home broadband adoption stood at 43 percent in May 2008, versus 40 percent the previous year.

Look, let's face a simple fact: Without high-speed access, all these on-line services, all the digital magazines, all the "web only content," all the "expanded offerings," it's all crap. It's useless. Even with high-speed access, getting stuff sometimes can be an agonizingly slow process that gets bogged down in traffic and swamped with pop-ups, ads, and unnecessarily graphic-intensive sites. With dial-up, even trying to see a YouTube video is usually an exercise in futility and sysiphean frustration - or at least Zen-like patience.

The point is, as more and more information becomes available only on-line and as more and more of that information effectively becomes available only to those with high-speed access, more and more people are going to be left behind and out.

People have spoken in the past about a digital divide. I fear we are seeing the emergence of an information divide, one where people simply will not have access to what they will need to act as well-informed citizens, one where there will be an information elite just as now there is an economic elite. For all the people chirping about how "information wants to be free," that is, unrestricted, the fact is that while the information itself may be free in a philosophical sense, access to it is not in an economic one.

I remember when Al Gore was promoting what he called "the information superhighway." (Hey, I've been kicking around online long enough that I used Gopher regularly and a 28.8 modem is what you moved up to.) And certainly we've seen and continue to see the emergence of something at least similar to what he imagined. But just like cruising along on the interstate, as we fly down that digital superhighway we can become oblivious to the people traveling the potholed byways and dirt tracks that lie just a little beyond our route's shoulders - and, unlike the interstate, our highway is a toll road with tolls higher than a good number of folks can pay.