The other disappearing papers

The internet age has brought about the demise of several newspapers, and threatens the entire industry. Many folks have blogged about this and even newspaper reporters have written stories about it.

But there is another set of papers that is threatened by the internet, a set of papers about which no one (to my knowledge) has worried, blogged, or reported.

That set of papers is the rental apartment advertising books.

You know these books. They live in flimsy (but apparently indestructably flimsy) boxes on streetcorners in downtown neighborhoods. The list page after page of beautiful apartment buildings, each nicer than the last.

At some point, the internet is going to eat these advertising books. As with newspapers, they are expensive to produce and distribute. Their demise is inevitable; it will be a simple business decision to ax them when they produce less revenue than cost.

Their disappearance will not cause hue and cry. There will be no period of mourning, no ceremony for their passing. They are, unlike newspapers, artifacts of pure advertising. They have no "content", in the internet/web sense.

These little booklets of advertisements are enablers of commerce, nothing more.

And when they are gone, it means that we have built other mechanisms to enable commerce, and people have accepted those other mechanisms. Those mechanisms might be web pages, or e-mail lists, or spiffy iPhone apps, or something else. But they will exist, for commerce will exist.

The demise of the paper advertisement will signal the acceptance of the on-line advertisement.