Downloading books from most sites, or emailing attachments to yourself, is pretty easy. I had a few minor hiccups at first–using the Kindle to browse the Amazon store, for example, is less easy that simply using your PC–but the manual is easy to use and reasonably comprehensive. You don’t have to be tech savvy to use the features of the Kindle.

I do have one fairly minor complaint (it didn’t detract from my rating), but I really feel that the Kindle should come with a cover. They could have put together a cheap cover and still sold a better one, but a cover feels absolutely necessary to me.

I do recommend than anyone who purchases a Kindle take a look at the “999 boycott” tags, though. This is NOT a slam at Amazon or the Kindle, but a few publishers have decided not to pass the savings they receive by selling Kindle-format books on to their customers, charging standard book prices for ebooks. While they are free to do so, Kindle purchasers also have the right to say they won’t purchase books that don’t reflect at least some of these savings. Again, Amazon is not responsible for setting these prices, but the publishers need to be sent a message.

Go buy a Kindle 2.0 and support the publishers that understand what a boon for the publishing industry this is!

Likewise, research journals engage in editorial and peer review, which also helps ensure that those articles that make it into print aren’t likely to be crap. Even sites like slashdot have an implicit promise that “if you’re interested in geek news, you’ll find it here.”

In short, editors provide a valuable service as crap filters. I can’t see that going away any time soon. In fact, teh intertubes has much higher bandwidth than print media, so there’s a hell of a lot more crap to be filtered.

Our thinking is moving towards adjusting to the online universe. Case in point being that black text on a white background is a format inherited simply from centuries of book-reading.

The medium will evolve its own standardized preferences, and as the technology keeps improving, the problem of reading a lot online will become less.

Also the nature of the medium will redefine what we now know a “book publishing.” Old thinking dominates this model too – for centuries we read books one page at a time, and in fact, in the very early days of writing, we even scrolled to the next page of content.

Now, however, a new, more fully integrated and interactive style of publishing is coming. The user now can choose how he wants the content displayed by setting preferences on his own computer (thus negating the idea that you have to format the book to a fine degree in the first place).

Secondly, instead of a continuous reading of paragraphs, the user reads a small chunk of material, then clicks on a video, views an image or interacts with a graph or chart, or even sends his own input back to the author or other readers. The pix, vids, graphs, and interactive elements are woven directly into the “book”.

The whole way of defining your readers experience will be changed.

This is not to say books will disappear. They will still continue to bind some books. But to stay competitive, they are going to have to open up online operations equal to or greater than their book-binding operations.

The price they pay if they don’t is lost customers. And the quest for customers usually is sufficient to drive business models to change.

I agree the new media are faster and more interactive. It is nice to share opinion with other people. But books and magazines dying? No I don`t think so.

Andre

The point that I think people are missing here, is that it’s not about Internet vs books. Youtube vs television. It’s about stripping away the intermediaries between the creator of content, and the people who enjoy it. Goodbye gatekeepers.

In the past, there were a limited number of places a person could reach an audience. The gatekeepers made all the decisions. In some cases they had their finger on the pulse of what people wanted to see, and in other cases (Firefly, for example), they botched it in every single way possible.

The Internet as a model allows me, the producer (writer, recording artist, director, etc), to reach you without anyone deciding whether or not it’s marketable. When you strip away all those intermediaries, there’s plenty of money for the people who create the content.

When I write a book, I can release it in paper form, publish it over time as a blog, sell it as a downloadable book, read it out as a podcast, and set it to interpretive dance. The need for an external party to market and distribute it is over, as is their commission.

I still think you should publish the book yourself Phil. Baby steps, I understand.

I disagree that you get a minimum quality product from the television. Yes, television shows generally have high-quality cameras, good sound, and well-paid content generators, but they don’t always turn out good quality content—I’ll offer the endless Reality TV shows as an example.
You still have to separate the chaff from the wheat with television.
Moreover, television lacks the community and social aspects of the Internet. On the Internet, there are millions of other people who might be interested in the same kinds of things as you. Chances are, a few of them have blogs or have established a web-forum to discuss the kinds of content the like. These communities are great at separating the superstars from the average YouTuber.

I know at least on the radio side, you’re always hearing from the iPod People blather on and on about how they haven’t listened to radio in years and they only hear what they want and so on… yet, the audio stream from my station’s website gets a phenomenal amount of listeners. It took radio quite a few years to realize the benefit of streaming their audio, which they didn’t want to do because of royalty payments, but now they find they can complement their listener base tremendously and increase ad revenue significantly.

This is a pain in the neck for me as a producer, because now I have to produce two versions of any piece I put on the air, one for broadcast, one for streaming. But I know at least radio is adapting. I can see it in TV too, although cable’s doing a much better job so far. However, it was very neat and smart of NBC to put their new fall shows (including Bionic Woman) on Amazon Unbox for free downloads to Tivos and PCs. I’d love to know the number of downloads they’ve gotten…

“I love print. I love magazines that commit and pay for long articles
and long fiction. The web rewards neither approach. It’s a packeted
medium, a surf medium. Short bursts are the way to go. The web
isn’t a replacement medium — it’s *another” medium. That said, if
your concept of a magazine is something designed in one-page
bursts, or three pages that only carry 500 words due to the mass of
images, then, really, you’re not doing anything the web can’t do
better, are you?”

***

I haven’t picked up a copy of Wired in years but I read two or three of their blogs daily.

Just as an aside: I love books but I hate dead trees. We should have started making paper out of hemp or other massively renewable plants a long time ago.

Part of me wants to say that the fact that any Joe with a webcam can post videos to YouTube is going to discourage *real* artists from trying to stand out from the crowd, but even I know that’s silly. Part of this whole democratization of information thing does bother me, but it’s mainly because I really do prefer books and newspapers and I don’t want to see them left behind. But “real” artists are always going to be striving to stand out from the crowd, and part of me hopes they don’t have to give in to the YouTube hysteria just to survive.

But one point Thomas didn’t touch upon is that, in the near future, people are going to start to realize how silly it is to own a TV and a computer when the latter can do the job of both. Nonetheless, that won’t kill the “old media” television format, because only the existing television studios have the resources necessary to create shows with decent production values. They’re just going to start doing it over the Internet. The current cable and satellite models are going to die out, I think. The current cable infrastructure will survive, of course, to provide us with broadband Internet, but I don’t know if satellite television will make it through.

NBC is already catching on. You can watch their shows in their entirety on the Internet. Free but ad-supported, which is no worse than TV commercials. Brilliant idea, I think, and the only person who loses out is the cable provider (unless you’re watching it over your cable provider’s ISP, of course, like I am). But the quality is crap, so until Internet speeds can handle high-def streaming, people are still going to be motivated to go out and buy Heroes on DVD.

So Thomas is right; old media will adapt. TV will have the easiest time, as I described above. Newspapers? Maybe not so much.

The problem with “the tubes” is that it means money is going out of the “old media”. If the money goes out of it, a lot of content of all sorts is going to disappear. Sure any actor can make a movie and post it on YouTube, but I enjoy seeing the occasional blockbuster, and you won’t get blockbusters posted on YouTube because those blockbusters cost big bucks to produce. The people who make them will want to recover that cost and won’t be motivated to produce them if there’s little chance of recovery and profit.

The alternative, of course, is advertising on the net. But I think it’s fair to say that most people think advertising on web pages is, at best, irritating, and at worst, an abomination. Personally, I go out of my way to block advertising, as do many others. Web sites are already starting to emerge that will block users who use ad blockers.

So where does that leave us? I agree that old media is dying. New media is going to have to have a paradigm shift, however, if we collectively plan to maintain the selection and quality of media we have. It’s a fact that advertising and consumer dollars pay for this stuff. Unless people are prepared to start accepting advertising happily, or paying subscriptions to web content, there is going to be a problem much sooner than later. Right now, neither option is deemed acceptable and that is only a supportable position because other media sources are available.

Advertising is a major issue. With traditional media, you can pay a premium price for advertising-reduced media (Consumer Reports magazine has no advertising, for example), or you can ignore the advertising (I throw the flyers in the newspaper directly into the recycling bin). With computers, the advertising is much more in-your-face with cookies and pop-ups, adware and spyware, look-at-my-ads-or-get-lost code, and so forth. The consumer is getting less choice.

To put it simply, I’ll pay $50 to buy a hardcover copy of a book rather than read the book online for free with each page having a banner ad. I believe I am not alone in that stance.

Ed

1. I can’t take a computer into the bathroom with me. A small, light ebook reader would take care of this issue, but I’d still be more reluctant to use an expensive piece of electronics while in the bathtub.

2. Similarly, a cheap paperback is great to have on the beach where sun, sand, salt water, and neglect could cause problems for electronics.

3. People are more likely to steal an ebook reader than a book.

4. Even after a hundred years, a book’s batteries don’t run out.

5. When the publishing industry changes printing formats you don’t need to have a book converted to the new standard, buy new reading equipment, or throw out all your books and buy them again.

6. Sometimes when doing research, I have two or three books open at once. Sure I could do this digitally, but to have exactly the same effect I would need to have two or three full-sized ebook readers.

7. Audiobooks are nice, but they’re no substitute for the written word. The brain processes text in a very different way than it does sound, and reading is the closest thing we’ve got to having a data port in our heads.

I’m not a Luddite though. I think that electronic texts are invaluable for many purposes. In fact I recently finished transcribing a 15th century text into digital format to allow it to be shared and used more easily.

All that being said, I don’t have any magazines or newspapers anymore. I visit various newsites (some from traditional networks, some not) and surf the web for the fun stuff I used to get in magazines. Is “surfing” still an accepted term?

So, if someone as barbaric as I am can be so affected by the internet, I do think newspapers and magazines are dying. But maybe they’ll pull a “Doctor Who” and become something with new teeth.

But books are forever for simply one reason: they are romantic.

Only now (in 2007) are the company I work for doing things that were mooted way back in 2001.

Jason