Lost Entry- back where it belongs
So a month since updates due to craft shows, birthdays, holidays, and all the assorted shopping mental and emotional preparation that goes along with it. One upshot is that my sister gave me a copy of Getting Things Done by David Allen. I've been a fan of sites Lifehacker and 43 Folders like any other person who happened upon them and realized that more organization is needed.
So I was checking out some of Lifehacker's sites on the sidebar and went to working smart to find this entry on the death of traditional book publishing along with a follow-up.
I haven't read the comments yet (from the second post seems like it will take some time), but my first reaction is that people who read like to read books and that doesn't seem to be changing. What is changing is the size of people who like to read. What's changing for the book industry is that people don't need to sit down with a 256 page non-fiction book to learn about dinosaurs or computers. They can grab a summary online. The digital paper that the industry has been dreading for years is not going to be the equivalent to Ipod. Look at all the digital services that were around before MP3 players- the original Napster, Gnutella, etc. etc. Kids were burning mix CDs for each other from music they downloaded online well before the first IPod came out. The early adopters had already made the move to digital music well before the devices appeared. This isn't the same with digital books. Libraries and reference material. Yes. The days of having an encyclopedia in the house is long gone, but people are still going to want to have books to show off. CDs and vinyl aren't status symbols, but books still have a marginal value as that. They show a certain pedigree for people. Now this may drastically change the college and educational market, but that has been drastically changing for years. The real place to watch how these new technologies will change traditional publishing is the academic market and I certainly don't know enough about that to have a clear sense of what is happening.
So I was checking out some of Lifehacker's sites on the sidebar and went to working smart to find this entry on the death of traditional book publishing along with a follow-up.
I haven't read the comments yet (from the second post seems like it will take some time), but my first reaction is that people who read like to read books and that doesn't seem to be changing. What is changing is the size of people who like to read. What's changing for the book industry is that people don't need to sit down with a 256 page non-fiction book to learn about dinosaurs or computers. They can grab a summary online. The digital paper that the industry has been dreading for years is not going to be the equivalent to Ipod. Look at all the digital services that were around before MP3 players- the original Napster, Gnutella, etc. etc. Kids were burning mix CDs for each other from music they downloaded online well before the first IPod came out. The early adopters had already made the move to digital music well before the devices appeared. This isn't the same with digital books. Libraries and reference material. Yes. The days of having an encyclopedia in the house is long gone, but people are still going to want to have books to show off. CDs and vinyl aren't status symbols, but books still have a marginal value as that. They show a certain pedigree for people. Now this may drastically change the college and educational market, but that has been drastically changing for years. The real place to watch how these new technologies will change traditional publishing is the academic market and I certainly don't know enough about that to have a clear sense of what is happening.
posted by john at
9:34 PM
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