Okay, so Phil "Marketing Dude" Schiller didn't actually come right out and say that "print is dead," but he came darn close. According to a Macworld article, at the NAB press conference, he reportedly got on his soapbox and postulated that "desktop video is now bigger than desktop publishing." As evidence, Phil rattled off some numbers about the number of digital camcorders available these days, the booming sales of the iMac DV, and the admittedly impressive percentage of iMac DV owners using those happy little space eggs to edit their home movies.

Huh? So one in three U.S. iMac DV owners is using iMovie, and the numbers are even higher in Japan. Does that really mean that, right now, more computer users overall are editing wedding videos than cranking out school newsletters? We think Phil might have been a little too liberal with that free Las Vegas booze the night before, because personally, we just don't see it. Maybe in a year that'll be true, with the prices of digital camcorders coming way down and the web making printed newsletters increasingly irrelevant. But as the article's author Christopher Breen rightly points out, Schiller's overly-exuberant remark may well reveal a fundamental aversion to dead-tree technologies that's spreading through Apple's Cupertino campus. Have you noticed that Apple products never come with a printed manual anymore? Paper is passé-- long live digital ink. (And video, of course.)

So there you have it: the conceit that the age of the printed word is over and done. And lest you think that's just an Apple thing, have you read Andy Ihnatko's latest column? On the whole it tackles the issue of the infamous "Bill Gates in a sweater" commercial, but in passing, Andy notes that in the latest issue of Brill's Content, there's a four-page ad for the e-book-strategy "Microsoft Reader," which actually claims that "in the not-too-distant future paper newspapers will cease production and printed books will only be popular as collectibles." Wow. Does that mean that our gag-gift copy of The Road Ahead by Bill Gates (purchased by a friend for one dollar at Buck-A-Book) might actually be worth something someday?