The Future Of Books: A Dystopian Timeline | TechCrunch

John Boggs projects a timeline for books transitioning to digital.

John Biggs via TechCrunch

2013 – EBook sales surpass all other book sales, even used books. EMagazines begin cutting into paper magazine sales.
2014 – Publishers begin “subsidized” e-reader trials. Newspapers, magazines, and book publishers will attempt to create hardware lockins for their wares. They will fail.
2015 – The death of the Mom and Pops. Smaller book stores will use the real estate to sell coffee and Wi-Fi. Collectable bookstores will still exist in the margins.
2016 – Lifestyle magazines as well as most popular Conde Nast titles will go tablet-only.
2018 – The last Barnes & Noble store converts to a cafe and digital access point.
2019 – B&N and Amazon’s publishing arms – including self-pub – will dwarf all other publishing.
2019 – The great culling of the publishers. Smaller houses may survive but not many of them. The giants like Random House and Penguin will calve their smaller houses into e-only ventures. The last of the “publisher subsidized” tablet devices will falter.
2020 – Nearly every middle school to college student will have an e-reader. Textbooks will slowly disappear.
2023 – Epaper will make ereaders as thin as a few sheets of paper.
2025 – The transition is complete even in most of the developing world. The book is, at best, an artifact and at worst a nuisance. Book collections won’t disappear – hold-outs will exist and a subset of readers will still print books – but generally all publishing will exist digitally.

I think this is too slow for the technological West and way too slow for the less advanced world in terms of adoption and availability.

For example, there will be thriving (short term) businesses in the US buying paper textbooks which will be packaged up and shipped to third world countries. But ereaders will rapidly — 2015? — become the norm, since they can play on people’s mobile devices, including our genius phones.

And Biggs is really off when he calls this dystopian. It’s just emphemeralization, where information technology allows us to move bits around instead of atoms.

Add a Soundtrack to Your Reading Experience with Booktrack

Meg Rayford viaTech Cocktail

Your favorite movies have their own unique soundtracks, and now your favorite books can, too. Founded by Paul Cameron, Booktrack is a startup that is changing reading – and the publishing industry – forever.

Booktrack creates synchronized soundtracks for ebooks to enhance the reader’s imagination and engagement. Combining music, sound effects and ambient sound, Booktrack’s technology automatically paces itself to an individual’s reading speed.

I mentioned the idea of a ‘booktrack’ to some friends last night, and it elicited a surprisingly heated response from several, who seemed almost angry at the audacity of those that would ordain what music should accompany the reading of a book. But, I wondered, don’t you accept the idea that there is a soundtrack in a movie? But my friends went on grumbling, even after agreeing that there was a certain authoritarianism in a movie soundtrack as well, but they maintained that book reading was a soliltary activity, and a s a result, no one should get in between the words and your mind.

Wow. I have a feeling this may not catch on with everyone.

(Source: underpaidgenius)

Books As Social Objects

Verlyn Klinkenborg makes some astute observations about his use of iPad and Kindle as a reader of books, in particular the role that books play in social intercourse and how this is diminished because of the restrictions that digital book tools place upon us:

The entire impulse behind Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks assumes that you cannot read a book unless you own it first — and only you can read it unless you want to pass on your device. That goes against the social value of reading, the collective knowledge and collaborative discourse that comes from access to shared libraries. That is not a good thing for readers, authors, publishers or our culture.

Removing the social affordance of loaning someone a book is perhaps the worst crime perpetuated by the new world order of digital content. The communitarian aspect of shared books in libraries is similarly damaged.

Books should be social. Our personal property should be ours to loan to friends.

Imagine if Sears mde it impossible for me to loan my chain saw, or if fingerprint recognition on my VW made it impossible for a neighbor to borrow it?

But, in the name of countering ‘piracy’, we can’t loan The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress to a friend. And our society is lessened because of that.

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