The editors of Resolve, the blog of LiveBooks, posted this week an interesting open question for everyone to attempt to answer: “What do you think photobooks will look like in 10 years? Will they be digital or physical? Open-source or proprietary? Will they be read on a Kindle or an iPhone? And what aesthetic innovations will have transformed them?”

As founder and editor of the Green Tea Gallery Magazine, several times I have asked myself this very question in the past few years. I have to confess that, exactly as the editors at Resolve, I typically ended up narrowing this open question down to two opposite points of views – digital vs. physical – and I could never find an answer that could settle down the issue for me.

On one hand, I recognize the advantages and immediateness of the digital media, the only apparent solution to today’s thriving thirst for new content. On the other hand, I could not even consider dismissing the experience of holding a finely printed quality photography book. On the web we are literally bombarded by thousands of images on any given day. As an active Flickr user and online photo-blogger, I have often found myself literally going through hundreds of pictures in a single session, often spending no more than a few seconds on each image. While I did enjoy the artistic qualities of those images and I did appreciate being able to view the work of so many talented artists from all over the world, I could never get, from those compressed web-sized JPG images, the same feel that I get when I get completely lost in the details of the prints featured on the pages of some of the best photobooks in my private collection.

Then I realized that I was looking at the whole thing from the wrong perspective. I believe that both magazines and newspapers will phase out. We are already appreciating how the real-time and free-of-charge nature of the web has begun to kill newspapers. Magazines will follow. I have been an avid magazine reader since I was just a teenager. I still remember browsing with excitement through hundreds of magazine covers at the newspaper stand in my home town looking for something to bring home. Today, I honestly don’t remember the last time I purchased a magazine at the store.

Why did I embark in creating something called the Green Tea Gallery Magazine, then? Because I strongly believe in the revolutionizing social aspect of the web. People are curious by nature and love to collaborate. An online space like the Green Tea Gallery Magazine was born with the idea of being just that: a space in which artists can showcase their best work, photo enthusiasts can get to know established and emerging photographers from around the world and new collaborations can come out from this environment. While this space will remain mostly virtual, we are planning to embrace the growing on-demand printing services to produce some periodical publication, as soon as we believe that good quality on-demand printing can be achieved at low costs. I believe that there will always be people, like me, that like to get lost in the details of beautiful prints. Therefore, I believe that there will always be demand for high quality publication and photobooks.

What will change is the content of those photobooks. The Internet is already providing us with some of the tools needed to facilitate worldwide collaborations. We are seeing photography collaborations being born every single day on the web, in forms that are more specific to the web, like the video collaboration Around the World, Street Photography in B&W, or that are, more traditionally, high quality printed publications, like Publication, the exciting fruit of the collaboration of the photographers at In-Public. There will be more and more artistic collaborations that will flood the market with hundreds, if not thousands of new publications that will feature photography related projects, interviews and articles. I think that Publication, which offers both a magazine and a set of high quality prints, is the perfect example of the understanding of the evolution of the printed media.

Photobooks will continue to exist in both a physical and a digital form. While the average consumer will continue to be satisfied with the lower resolution of online rendering, the more sophisticated photo enthusiast will continue to purchase and collect the printed copies, paying special attention to the quality of those publications.