My friend Dean Adams, founder of the excellent www.SuperbikePlanet.com, is well known for many things, one of them being his frequent quote “Print is dead.” With the recent demise of the print version of Cycle News more and more evidence is mounting that Adams may just be on to something.

I for one hope that Dean is wrong.

Print is real, it’s a tangible thing, something that will last, something that people will collect and go back and refer to many decades later. When I’m longing for a good read I still go back to my archive of old motorcycle magazines dating back to the 1960s (a few even earlier) and read old racing articles, motorcycle tests and enjoy the photography. If I’m lacking inspiration I can always get my brain working again by pushing back from the computer, grabbing a cup of coffee and going back to read a few Phil Schilling columns in the pages of Cycle.

Even if you don’t have access to the print versions of these classic volumes, magazines and books can be scanned and put on online for future generations to enjoy. Even today in the age of the Web, racers get much more excited about getting a cover or feature in a magazine than they do online. It’s right there, real, touchable, something that can be passed around and shared with family and friends.

On the other hand content on the internet is immediate, multimedia capable, accessible by millions of eyes and ears, but it’s also out there in the ether. It can be here today and gone tomorrow.

They say once something gets on the Web it never dies. Yeah right. Try going back to find old AMA racing results that were once on the Web. Now that Pro Racing has been sold off the AMA evidently doesn’t feel like keeping its racing heritage alive by at least maintaining the old race results.

There are literally dozens, if not hundreds of motorcycling related websites that have come and gone since the Web came online in 1993. I hate to keep harping on the AMA, but does anyone remember its excellent pro racing websites, amasuperbike.com, amamotocross.com and amaflattrack.com? There were hundreds of rider interviews, race previews, racing coverage, history pieces, product tests, and more that are now all gone, perhaps forever.

Cycle News Online had an excellent archive of its entire early online back catalog that was lost when it changed to a new web host. I used to write for an excellent site called Moto1.net and when the Internet bubble popped in 2000 and it went belly up, its entire catalog of rich content evaporated into space.

Perhaps the best website to find early moto-related Web features was www.motorcycle.com, the first real motorcycle website. MO, as longtime fans called the site, realized the importance of keeping its old features alive, but even that site has gone through management change and redesign and I’m not certain all its old content is still available.

I may be old school, but I still love to have a magazine or book that I can touch, bookmark, put down and come back to later and, if I so choose, collect. Something that will last for years and can’t simply be obliterated by one keystroke into a digital mishmash of zeros and ones.