Having connected and electronic books gives you possibilities that weren't available when they're in print. They might lose some of the advantages of print (like bragging rights of having a full bookshelf), but the advantages it confers outweighs it in other ways that you can't imagine if you frame it in terms of the old.
As with any new technology, it's hard to think of it in terms of the old technology. The often quoted quip about radio is:
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?" -- Associates of David Sarnoff responding to the latter's call for investment in the radio in 1921.
What's funny is that later, a radio pioneer says this about television:
"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming." -- Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, 1926
While TV might have killed the radio star, it hasn't completely supplanted it. By the same token, paper books won't go away any time soon, but you'll soon see advantages to having electronic and sharable books. You can search it, annotate it (as a group!), and cross reference it. You can discuss it and you can get it instantly, and licenses pending, we might get a new market of people that slice and dice excerpts from different sources--not just blogs and feeds, but from classics (Caterbury tales, Catch-22, etc)...like reader digest, but a proliferation of it based on different niches and interests.
> You can search it, annotate it (as a group!), and cross reference it.
See, this sounds a lot like the Interweb I keep hearing about.
Funny thing is, writers can write for the interwebs and get paid by the word, by ads, or per-download (I find that latter proposition less often, but it's there). Alls you need to read those things is a laptop or an iPhone.
What does the Kindle bring to the table? It's a neutered computer, a broadcast (output-only) device with a shitty little keyboard that allows people to purchase stuff and mindlessly consume it. Commenting is more difficult than with a computer, as far as I can tell, and the device costs as much as an iPhone, but seems to offer far less.
Really, what's the point? It doesn't seem to offer benefits the way that radio, TV, cell phones, or the Web did (versus preceding technologies). It's an expensive black-and-white device that enables Amazon to more efficiently take your money... what are the upsides?
> you'll soon see advantages to having electronic and sharable books.
I've been seeing those advantages since I first started browsing the physics papers at CERN using Mosaic, thanks.
I thought the comparison was between paper books vs ebooks, not ebooks vs the web. That was what I was responding to anyway.
But you're right about eBooks being a neutered computer. That doesn't mean it won't be well suited for reading, buying, sharing, and talking about books however. If you showed me a mobile phone in the mid 90's and told me people millions of people would communicate via text message on a shitty little keypad, I'd have called you crazy, bet you a kobe beef steak.....and lose.
All I'm saying is that new forms of the same thing allow you to do things you might not been able to do before, and that's advantageous even if it loses some of the good properties of its old medium (like a bookshelf). Sometimes, people treat the same thing with a new form in different ways. Comments are really just topic centered guestbooks of the 90's. And yet bloggers, trading opinions on a guestbook all the time since we call it comments. By the same token, I suspect having digital books on a neutered computer will have its advantages, not immediately apparent, mostly from how we view or interact with the things.
I don't know if Kindle itself will be successful, but I think eBooks might have a chance. Of course, it's just a hunch as I have no proof as to exactly how, and I could lose another kobe beef steak to you. If I knew exactly what, I probably would be doing this as my startup, rather than post this comment to let you know.
> I thought the comparison was between paper books vs ebooks, not ebooks vs the web.
That's the thing, though -- it's as if we're pretending that the Web and eBooks are as different as radio and TV, when in reality, they're about as different as FM and AM radio. I think that one of them offers enough marginal benefit to trounce the other -- and in the case of the Kindle, the ''other'' is more expensive while offering less!
I don't see a divide between the Web and eBooks. I see a divide between digital content and print content. And I think that, just like the Web is reducing the market for newspapers, it's going to reduce the market for print books. It won't eliminate it. But god knows any eBook has all the drawbacks of the web (the transient nature of its contents) and few if any advantages beyond the low power draw and sharp screen. The former can be made irrelevant by better batteries; the latter is being made irrelevant by better screens. So what's the advantage of Kindle?
It's quite mad. Mark Pilgrim does a great job of documenting the misfeatures in his 'Future of Reading' bit.
As with any new technology, it's hard to think of it in terms of the old technology. The often quoted quip about radio is:
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?" -- Associates of David Sarnoff responding to the latter's call for investment in the radio in 1921.
What's funny is that later, a radio pioneer says this about television:
"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming." -- Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, 1926
While TV might have killed the radio star, it hasn't completely supplanted it. By the same token, paper books won't go away any time soon, but you'll soon see advantages to having electronic and sharable books. You can search it, annotate it (as a group!), and cross reference it. You can discuss it and you can get it instantly, and licenses pending, we might get a new market of people that slice and dice excerpts from different sources--not just blogs and feeds, but from classics (Caterbury tales, Catch-22, etc)...like reader digest, but a proliferation of it based on different niches and interests.