The end of the page-turner
Earlier this week a nice article about the future of e-books appeared in The Independent: The end of the page-turner
In just a few short years, MP3 downloads and the iPod changed the face of the music industry. CDs are going the way of the dodo, and high-street music stores fear for the future. Now there’s a revolution on the horizon; this time in the realm of books.
It still remains to be seen how and if the printed industry will follow the same path as the music industry but we can’t deny the fact that there has been a growing interest in e-books over the last year. More important is the noticeable positive attitude toward e-books and for more and more people the future of digital reading seems to be a bright one and I count myself as one of those.
What do you think? Do you think print is dead?
4 Comments so far
The pbook is definately not dead, but the ebook will become more and more important with progressing eink and similar technologies. With th introduction of flexible A4 formats with fast switch times, it will grow strong on a much larger userbase. And once you get color into the game, the business will explode i think.
So get us some flexible A$ color iLiads as soon as possible
[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today on The end of the page-turnerHere’s a quick excerptEarlier this week a nice article about the future of e-books appeared in The Independent: The end of the page-turner. In just a few short years, MP3 downloads and the iPod changed the face of the music industry. … […]
Thinking paper books are on brink of extinction just because CDs (and MCs etc) are, means to ignore that books own sensual aspects which sound storage media do not have: you can touch a book while ‘consuming’ it, you can smell it (I love the smell of fresh print), and I doubt there are many people that will disagree when I say: books simply look grand on a shelf in your living room.
I might be wrong (I sure hope I am not), but I think those aesthetic and sensual factors should not be underestimated.
IMHO,
what really changed the music business and the relations between industry and consumers is not the mp3 technology itself, it’s rather P2P file sharing.
An iPod can store up to 40.000 songs. At about 1€ each, they sum up the cost of a SUV. Who have ever spent so much for music?
Despite it, I know several people who have to buy external HDD’s to accomodate their music collection, and they have to empty and resync the iPod several times because it isn’t enough to store it all.
And this is the most feared scenario by the book industry. Simply they cannot stand it.
The impossibility to achieve an efficient DRM technology is keeping a serious hand-brake on the e-book market developement.
If every iPod owner had an iLiad, how many of them would have bought a copy of the “da Vinci Code” rather then e-mule it?
The whole content industry business model have to be rethought from scratch to make a significant step into the future.