Once again, the industry has heard the news of the doors slamming shut at another one of its print publications. Only this time, the dying publication is the most-read title in the industry: Scrapbooks Etc.

As one scrapbook magazine after another has closed its doors the past few years (Memory Trends, Simple Scrapbooks, Digital Scrapbooking, Memory Makers, and now Scrapbooks Etc), it is tempting to declare that scrapbooking is dying. Why else would the industry be littered with the shredded remains of revered publications?

The answer is simple. Yes, it’s inescapable that something is dying. But that something isn’t scrapbooking. It’s something larger: the printed word on paper.

Scrapbooking is certainly undergoing a decline after a few years at an unsustainable high as a fad, but not one so catastrophic that it would cause the industry’s leading magazine to pull the plug on its publication.

Instead, the culprit is the internet, and the iPad, and the Kindle, and the Nook, and the numerous electronic methods of publishing and viewing content that have exploded in the past five years. They’ve changed everything from the business model of delivering content, to the consumer’s expectation of that content. [Read more...]