What is the future of publishing/print in 10 years? Will it die?
If I knew the answer to that question, I’d be richer than Trump.
My best advice is to not put all your eggs in the print basket. If you can expand your skills/knowledge into the digital realm, do it.
Some insider publishing talk here. Right now ebooks seem to have evened out at about 30% of the market. But that is highly dependent upon technology. The first wave of readers and iPods being hot is what drove the ebook market to grow in the first place. So if there’s another tech leap, then digital will spring up again.
At the same time print has become fetishized. Look at all the gorgeous penguin classics editions, folio society editions, and book cover tee shirts on hipsters. Print magazines almost died out for a minute there, but now small run high-quality print mags are in a renaissance. The entire country (if not western first world) is in an analog/nostalgia trend currently, and that has a lot to do with where we’re at as a country. That’s a long convo, but no, print isn’t going to go anywhere anytime in our lifetimes. There will always be a push/pull between new tech and nostalgic formats.
Print isn’t going anywhere (how the hell would anyone in NYC decorate?). However, if you are a designer, you need to be equally fluent in both print and digital. Illustrators, it’s less important whether your work is created digital or traditional, but it IS important to take into account how it looks on screen, and how it looks in teeny tiny thumbnail/mobile form.