Electronic Book
7:33 PM 4/2/2009Last week I went in to a bookstore. I bought two books.
Why is this interesting?
Because one of the books I bought predicts the demise of books: Gregory J. E. Rawlins's 1996 book "Moths To The Flame: The Seductions Of Computer Technology"
Rawlins often deals in the book with technology putting people out of work - What you might call the replacement of labor with capital. Technology is usually intended to make life better, but better for who?
Chapter 3 - "The Power Of Ideas" - opens with a little vignette about the extinction of the dinosaurs. I didn't know what Rawlins was getting at. Soon it became clear with a story about Gutenberg's printing press putting scribes out of work and the subsequent rise of literacy.
But, the chapter is actually about electronic books: How awesome they would be: Paper books can't update their contents, or show you computer simulations. Paper eventually decays. Books weigh a ton. Publishing and distribution of a title is a risky investment. Why don't we just eliminate every link in the chain from printing presses to bookstores? People could get weightless computer files over the Internet directly from the publisher.
Some people love books. Count me as one. I'm not planning to ever buy a Kindle. Look at what happened before the Kindle came along: Readers didn't order directly from publishers. They went to large retailers. Those large retailers put their catalogs on-line. But it was still the same paper books.
Stores sold audio books on cassette tapes. At the time, people wanted to listen to something while jogging, or driving in their car. I could see where the format was headed: The players were getting more sophisticated. Audio, then video could fit in your pocket - it was easy to imagine long before it became available - and it only gets cheaper every year.
I've been trying to express the problem with electronic books for days now, and all I could manage was one little monkey-wrench of an idea:
Electronic Book Readers are Broken Computers
But, now I notice someone else is talking.
There are now many people running around with the Internet on their phones. I remember some talk about usability design for mobile phones: Web designers would need to consider new ways their sites might be viewed. With the exception of some typical browser compatibilities, I don't think this is true anymore: Mobile phones can show you the same Internet.
Web Sites are Books
Think about it. This equation sets up a two-way flow: Web is an interactive technology. All web pages are available to a hand-held Internet browser. A book is a bounded text with unified design elements - fonts, colors, illustrations; paragraphs, chapters... A book can be as badly designed as a web site. Have you ever seen a book that couldn't be replicated as hypertext? Some books aren't really suited to be books anyway - we might do away with books that simply reprint a database and become obsolete with every change.
I see an obvious problem with rights. And payment.