If people get too dragged down by fear, then they're going to lose out. For example, when Napster first hit the scene, the music companies (and certain heavy metal bands) freaked out and responded by shutting them down. As they now acknowledge, it was totally the wrong approach:
We used to fool ourselves…We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won. (Bronfman, head of Warner)
What if they'd worked with Napster to turn it into a subscription based music service, or something like iTunes? They could have ridden the front of the wave, instead of scrambling to catch up.
If the publishing business doesn't learn from this, then they're fools. Stop focusing on all the things that make physical books better -- you can read it on the beach! books are still greener! -- because the digital form will overtake the physical book. I don't think books will disappear, but the digital form has only just begun, so people have no idea what it's capable of. A soundtrack to go with the story? More visual content because it's just as easy/cheap to put a picture in a digital book than to put in words? Interactive content? Research content? Hyperlinked footnotes? Imagine you're reading Harry Potter #4 and a character references something that happened in book 2--and imagine if you had the capability to click on a link and it would take you back to the appropriate passage in book 2?
Right now the possibilities are endless. Our predictions about the digital form are going to be wrong, and probably as silly as a Jules Verne story; but the reality is still going to be beyond our wildest imaginations. I'll get off my soap box now.
3 comments:
You're thinking along the right lines I bet. Consumers will come to expect more interactive media even with historically static things like books... iPad - ish things will be most capable to develop this. I find my self imagining Macbeth where I could read the old English script to try to understand Shakespeare's style and forms etc... but at the click of a button, immediately see it acted out in a film version. I mention this because in high school we were force-fed Macbeth... bored teens reading through all this olde english... snoooze fest... BUT THEN at the end the teacher actually showed us parts of the play professionally acted out!!! WHOLE different experience. The strange english actually becomes comprehensible when spoken by a good actor who knows where the pauses and emphases should fall!! Wow!!!
I can see stuff like that all being popped into a multi-media "book."
Also books that will read themselves to you when your eyes are tired - in a very human voice beyond anything we've computer-generated to now. Perhaps "stitched" together like the video games do with text now? OR actually read by voice actors and embedded in the text..?
As you say - endless possibilities.
But as I was browsing the second-hand bookstore today - there will always be at least a niche market for "real" paper books - even if it's only as antiques. There's something special about that format too.
how about interactive authorship (multiple authors, and interactive with the readers) and 'blending of media'? http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/05/25/mongoliad-neal-stephenson-subutai/
Jamie - Mysterious!
And it just occurred to me that ebooks could also bring back the Charles Dickens serial novel. King tried it with The Green Mile, but with an ebook the new chapter could download automatically.
Oh it's all veddy interesting.
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