“我真佩服你如此自信，”当一位同事听说，我打算在圣安德鲁斯大学(St Andrews)辩论协会的面前，替印刷品辩护时，他这样说道。从之前与一些年轻人的交谈中我已发现，现在很少有人还会读报纸。今年7月，亚马逊(Amazon)宣布，其电子书销量已超过纸质书。因此，我的使命听上去的确成功无望。
我们的辩论动议“印刷媒体已经消亡”（当然，这里应该用复数）有些夸大其辞，这起到了一定的帮助作用。印刷品显然还没有消亡。在驶往苏格兰的火车上我注意到，把头埋在报纸和书里的人数，决不少于盯着笔记本电脑和iPad看的人。
但不应从字面理解这句话。其言下之意是：一旦我们这些学生接过你们这帮老家伙的班，印刷品就会立即消亡。
一名报纸记者站在支持印刷品一方，很容易遭到还击：“哦，他当然会支持，不是吗？”这可不一定。从职业角度出发，这对我无所谓。英国《金融时报》自信任何媒介形式都能做得有声有色——我们可是少数几家成功对在线新闻收费的新闻机构之一。
就我个人而言，尽管我每天会花好几个小时上网和使用便携设备，但只要印刷书和报纸存在一天，我就会阅读一天，并一直珍爱下去。
它们会存在下去吗？让我们做一个一段时间以来人们已经在做的思想实验。假想一个从未存在过印刷品的世界，我们只用过电脑及其替代产品。肯定有一天，会跳出某个聪明的发明家说：“我有了一个主意。印刷！”我所能追溯到的最早进行这个思想实验的人是英国《独立报》(The Independent)某位不知名的创始人。安德鲁•马尔(Andrew Marr)在11年前的《观察家报》(The Observer)上提到过他；马尔表示，这位创始人多年前就向他讲述过这个想法。虽然我们现在身处2010年，拥有各种当时不可能有的新鲜玩意儿——宽带、iPad、Kindle、黑莓等等，不一而足——但作为一种新发明，印刷仍魅力十足。
想像一下为这些新奇的纸质产品进行的市场营销活动：“你是否已厌倦了乱糟糟一堆、每个只能匹配一个数码产品的充电器？烦死了那些只能插入圣迭戈的插座、却无法在悉尼或萨里使用的插头了吗？你是否害怕听到通知你的屏幕即将一片空白的嘟嘟声？”
“现在，和充电的烦恼说再见吧！欢迎阅读印刷品！你可以翻动书页，可以折叠报纸，欢迎来到这个阅读乐趣永不‘停机’的世界。把书搁到书架上。把报纸丢到抽屉里。一周之后拿出来，100年之后拿出来，它们永远呆在那儿，随时等你去阅读。你无法相信印刷品的下载速度。因为压根就无所谓什么下载速度！印刷品永远处在‘开机状态’。”
“在度假行李箱里放一本书。在游泳包里塞一份报纸。你的书要是掉到岩石上，会发生些什么？啥事儿也不会有。要是报纸掉进游泳池里呢？这可不是什么好事，但也算不上世界末日。在太阳底下晒一会儿就行。干了之后会有一点儿皱，但完全不影响阅读。要换成电子书掉到这些地方呢？想都不敢想。”
不错，印刷品的上述优势中，肯定会有一些逐渐消失。总有一天，各家数码产品生产商之间会达成协议，通用同一种充电器和插头。他们甚至还可能开发出1年内都无须充电的产品，或者是使自己的产品具备防水抗震功能。
但印刷品还有其它优势。它百毒不侵，病毒、黑客及其它电子入侵者都对它无可奈何。最重要的是，它不会因科技潮流的变幻而变得无法阅读。FT几年前刊登的一篇文章指出，学者们现在仍能够阅读写在羊皮上、已有900年历史的《末日审判书》(Domesday Book)。而1986年，英国广播电视公司(BBC)用青少年日记和录像资料，制作了一个现代版的“末日审判书”，以记录现代英国生活。但不出10年，这些资料就已无法阅读了，因为它们是刻录在一个巨大的激光影碟上的，而能播放这种影碟的机器早已不复存在。
数码产品也有许多优点：你点击文章后可以直接链接到资料来源；可以四处散播所学知识；还可以与同事和朋友们分享看法。但我们不知道，在我们阅读和储存的数码资料中，有多少会因新技术而废弃，让资料变得不便甚至无法阅读。我们不知道，现在保存的数码资料中，有多少会彻底丢失。
纸质书已经受了成百上千年的考验。无论发生什么，印刷品都永远不会消失。我的一位辩论对手引用了新技术拥趸杰夫•贾维斯(Jeff Jarvis)的话：“文字将在印刷品中走向灭亡。”而情况恰恰相反，正是印刷品让我们的历史得以延续。
圣安德鲁斯大学的学生们是怎么想的？赞同印刷品会消亡的有10人，而有102人认为不会。动议被推翻了。
译者/陈云飞
http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001035294
“I’m glad you’re so confident,” a colleague said when he heard I was going to argue the case for print in front of the University of St Andrews debating society. In previous talks to young people I had found few who read newspapers. Amazon announced in July that it was now selling more e-books than hardcovers. So my mission did seem hopeless.
It helped that our motion, “Print media is dead” (it should have been “are dead”, of course), was overstated. Print clearly isn’t dead. On my train to Scotland, as many people were lost in newspapers and books as in laptops and iPads.
But the motion was not supposed to be read literally. The implied meaning was: print will be dead as soon as we students have taken over from you oldies.
A newspaper journalist arguing the case for print risks a riposte of “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” It depends. Professionally, it doesn’t much matter to me. The Financial Times is confident of thriving in any medium. We are one of the few news organisations successfully charging for our online journalism.
Personally, while I spend hours every day on the internet and on hand-held devices, I will read and cherish printed books and newspapers for as long as they survive.
Will they survive? Let us do a thought experiment that people have been performing for some time. Imagine a world in which print had never existed, in which all we had were computers and their successors. Surely some smart inventor would say: “I’ve got an idea. Print!” The earliest such thought experimenter I can trace is an unnamed founder of The Independent newspaper. He was quoted by Andrew Marr in the Observer 11 years ago; Mr Marr said the founder had put the notion to him years earlier. Yet here we are in 2010, with gadgets unobtainable then – broadband, iPads, Kindles, BlackBerrys – and the attraction of print as a new invention remains as potent as ever.
Imagine the marketing campaign for these newfangled paper-based products: “Tired of that tangle of chargers, one for each digital thingy? Sick of those plugs that fit the sockets in San Diego but not in Sydney or Surrey? In dread of the ‘beep’ that tells you your screen is about to go blank?
“Well, say goodbye to recharging misery! Welcome to Print, to the book with pages you can turn, to the newspaper you can fold – to a world of reading pleasure that never shuts down. Put your book on a shelf. Toss your newspaper in a drawer. Take them out a week later. Take them out 100 years later. There they are, ready to be read. You won’t believe print’s download speed. There is no download speed! Print is always ‘on’.
“Pack a book in your holiday suitcase. Slip a newspaper in your beach bag. What happens if you drop your book on the rocks? No harm done. Your newspaper in the pool? Not a great idea, but not the end of the world either. Leave it in the sun for a while. It will be a bit wrinkled, but still perfectly legible. Drop your digital reader in any of those places? Don’t even think about it.”
Now, no doubt some of these advantages of print will recede over time. At some point, rival manufacturers of digital gadgets may agree on a single, universal charger and a plug that works everywhere. Perhaps they will even develop products that don’t need to be charged for, say, a year. They may make their offerings waterproof and shock resistant.
But print has other advantages. It is impervious to viruses, hackers and other electronic intruders. Most important, it won’t be rendered unreadable when the technological wind changes. An FT article a few years ago pointed out that, while scholars can still read the 900-year old Domesday Book, written on sheepskin, a BBC project to create an equivalent 1986 record of British life, using adolescent diaries and video tours, was unusable within a decade. It had been recorded on huge laser discs and the machines no longer existed to run them.
The digital world offers many advantages: articles that allow you to click straight through to the sources, the opportunity to spread learning around, to share thoughts with colleagues and friends. But we don’t know how much of what we are reading and storing digitally will be superseded by new technologies that make what is now on our screens inconvenient, or impossible, to read. We don’t know how much of what is stored digitally will simply disappear.
Books have stood the test of centuries. Whatever happens, print will always be there for us. One of my debate opponents quoted Jeff Jarvis, a new-technology champion, who said: “Print is where words go to die.” No. Print is where our history lives on.
What did the St Andrews students think? Ten agreed that print was dead; 102 voted that it wasn’t. Motion defeated.
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