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May 26, 2010
I'm increasingly reading online rather than buying books--dipping in and out of Google Books. I no longer think of buying books for my bookshelves or even building new bookshelves. I would suspect that book sales are dropping for the publishing industry.
Now that the iPad is seen as the container for a new kind of book, this post on why e-books failed previously and may again is worthwhile reading, as we move into a post-Gutenberg world. The publishing industry is standing in the way, protecting its profits from hardback sales because they reckon that cheap e-books are going to cut into their bread-and-butter retail sales.
In Challenging publishers to change isn’t the safe path Mitch Ratcliffe says that currently we are:
at a time when readers are beginning to define the use of their attention in radically different ways, collecting not whole finished works, but instead discovering parts of books in other books, on Web pages and in articles, and reading their way into those titles over time. Reading relationships are accretive, they build up over time. You find a quote you like and recall it, perhaps writing it down. Later, you come across the author’s name, the same quote or another quote somewhere else and make additional connections to the work where that quote resides. Finally, you might go searching for the book or the author to see the whole idea in the context it was presented, in a book you order online or check out from a library.
The argument is that publishers need to reject the idea of a finished and closed product that exists between the covers of a book so that the work can be freed to interact with readers in a networked marketplace.
Future eBooks will contain multimedia (video), 3d graphics, sound files, and more. Instead of just words on a page we will layer video throughout the text, add photos, hyperlink material, engage social networks of readers who will add their own videos, photos, and wikified information so that these multimedia books become living, breathing, works of art. They will exist on the Web, be ported over to any and all mobile devices that can handle multimedia, laptops, netbooks, and e-readers in a networked world. Such open books will incorporate the interaction of readers.
Soon we will be reading books on the iPad and our bookshelves will look to be historical objects wrapped in nostalgia of old black and white photographs.
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