MSNBC Oprah, Bill Gates and the Future of Books

"How primitive is the current system? Later this century, kids will be amazed to learn how we used to distribute books. Think about it. We grow entire forests, chop them down, flatten them out, spread ink on them, turn them into bricks of wood pulp, which we then drive around the country on trucks. Our children won’t be amazed because we were primitive—they’ll be amazed that we were so rich. Current-day book publishing is a tremendously wasteful way of moving information around: while paper is a terrific display mechanism, it’s a terrible transport device. Publishers take huge risks when they print and ship large quantities of books—and that’s why gatekeepers like Oprah so utterly control the fate of books and authors."

"While consumers have been quick to buy MP3 players for online audio—not much different, really, than a Walkman that plays cassettes—there’s simply nothing in our retail genes that drives us to buy “book players.” So the e-book may have to sneak in disguised as something else."

redux [08.28.01]
The New York Times Forecasts of an E-Book Era Were, It Seems, Premature
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"A year later, however, the main advantage of electronic books appears to be that they gather no dust. Almost no one is buying. Publishers and online bookstores say only the very few best-selling electronic editions have sold more than a thousand copies, and most sell far fewer. Only a handful have generated enough revenue to cover the few hundred dollars it costs to convert their texts to digital formats."

"Consumers appear confused, Mr. Arland said, because the devices are neither computers nor hand-held organizers, nor do they connect to the Internet. The appliances download electronic books over phone lines directly from a central server.

The device has been the kind of purchase people imagined someone else might enjoy."

redux [08.12.00]
SiliconValley.Com Forget the hype, e-books still hard on the eyes

"The publishing industry has gotten very excited about electronic books lately. Random House, Time Warner and just about every other publishing giant has put out a flurry of announcements outlining grand plans for digital distribution.

Adding to the hype, Microsoft last week released its Microsoft Reader 1.5 software for the PC, and Barnesandnoble.com released 2,000 e-book titles, while promising to release 150 more each week.

Ignore all this stuff. E-book technology is just not ready. It's too hard to read on the screen."

redux [03.09.00]
Alertbox Electronic Books - A Bad Idea

"Even when electronic books gain the same reading speed as print, they will still be a bad idea. Electronic text should not mimic the old medium and its linear ways. Page turning remains a bad interface, even when it can be done more conveniently than by clicking the mouse on a "next page" button. It is an insufficient goal to make computerized text as fast as print: we need to improve on the past, not simply match it.

The basic problem is that the book is too strong a metaphor: it tends to lead designers and writers astray. Electronic text should be based on interaction, hypertext linking, navigation, search, and connections to online services and continuous updates. These new-media capabilities allow for much more powerful user experiences than a linear flow of text. Linear text may have ruled the world since the Egyptians learned to produce arbitrarily long scrolls of papyrus, but it's time to end this tradition. Nobody has time to read long reports any more: information must be dynamic and under direct control of the reader, not the author."

Xerox Research and Technology A Comparison of Reading Paper and On-Line Documents

"We report on a laboratory study that compares reading from paper to reading on-line. Critical differences have to do with the major advantages paper offers in supporting annotation while reading, quick navigation, and flexibility of spatial layout. These, in turn, allow readers to deepen their understanding of the text, extract a sense of its structure, create a plan for writing, cross-refer to other documents, and interleave reading and writing. We discuss the design implications of these findings for the development of better reading technologies."

redux [03.28.00]
Salon The revolution that wasn't

"The news that Stephen King would release a story exclusively in digital form and exclusively via the Web rode the media mountain like an intermediate skier on a black-diamond trail -- tentatively at first, then with a little more confidence and, finally, hurtling out of control, crashing into unexpected territory. The trade press gave its imprimatur, and within a few days the story spread like a virus over Web and wire. Television and radio chugged behind.

For those who've watched digital content come into its own, the frenzy was nothing short of remarkable."

"...[Publisher Simon & Schuster] seems to be proclaiming something more insidious with the publication of "Riding the Bullet": that not only can it drag us kicking and screaming into the next era of digital entertainment but that, as a traditional content provider, it can control how and when that will happen. For the consumer, it seemed to say, cyberspace offers much that is new -- speed, efficiency, lower costs. But it also reminded us that, for the moment, Old Media and traditional entertainment still rule."