My last blog was about the iPad and how great it is, and while the iPad alone may not signal the ushering in of a digital age of books, I think it may mark the new era of digital books.
It's no secret the iPad exists now and already the New York Times has an app coming out for the digital print edition, and talk of e-books and iPads seems to be two terms that get used in conjunction more and more. It's not just the iPad but Kindle and many others exist as well to make e-books more accessible, and while e-readers are still expensive, they're coming down in price and every year, just like mp3 players, and will soon be a common device (I predict 2010 holiday season).
E-books have been around for awhile though, so if digital books haven't caught on massively yet I don't think they'll have the same shock value on the print industry that digital music had on the record industry, but I think hardware like the iPad will be a catalyst in getting more people to embrace digital print. Books much like vinyl records, have a lot of symbolism and will never go away, but the convenience of having so much data and knowledge at your fingertips will be something that has an addictive quality to it, and I think it may be enough to shift a lot more people towards reading again. Especially in today's society where we see value in things that are easy and come to us. Using an e-reader is like using a computer or a novel so the familiarity will be there no matter who you are.
Contrary to my thoughts (which are pretty much haphazard at best), some in the industry think digital books, more so their prices, will kill paper books. Some companies have have gone as far (Macmillan) to take action against Amazon selling their books digitally for $10, and Amazon even bowed to some of the pressure (read about it here ).
I think it's exciting to see books talked about so hotly, as a musician and someone who's made some money off music, I honestly could care less about some bigger record companies getting ripped off, but a lot of these big book publishers have aggressively adapted prices to the market, not to mention how much effort goes into these books. I think of all the years it takes some authors to write the 900 page programming books I use, then I think of that godawful template music on the radio, and I can't help but feel some authors are under paid.
I don't think digital books will have that same tactile ease or pleasure you get from flipping through a text book, but to carry primers to C++, C#, and Lua in one handy little reader that weighs a pound could be something just as pleasurable. Either way I can't wait to see what comes next for digital print.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment