Monday, February 15, 2010
But libraries may save the day
The full impact of e books won't be felt until public & school libraries go over to them, a process still in the early stages.
The big print publishers need to understand the reality of the 21st century: either you roll with new technology or you get rolled over by it. That's the lesson of the history of technology in commerce.
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Anyone with an imagination about the future of technology and commerce knows that the printed book on paper is already on its way to obsolescence. The wrangling and beefing and whining about prices and protecting demand for printed books by publishing executives is both amusing and tragic.
In an online discussion on the matter, someone said that Amazon & Apple will go to court over distribution rights. Yes, they will. Crazy as it may sound, I suggested that public libraries are still more powerful than Amazon or Apple in the land of books. Libraries are the most important purchasers & promoters of non-textbook literature by new authors. Public & school libraries subsidize new fiction authors, & non-fiction, not to mention children's books, & many less popular genres. Nearly every university press in America must sell more of copies of most titles to libraries than to the general public. Amazon & Apple have nothing to do with this. The publishers will negotiate with libraries; fighting them is inviting a public relations disaster. Taxpayers pay for libraries, & when they use libraries they see it's one place they generally get their money's worth, not only in books to read but in a wide variety of services including entertaining one's children for an hour or two for free or for the cost of some cheap craft materials. Libraries have already formed cooperatives to loan audiobooks, & e books will be handled in much the same way. There will be bare-bones e book readers without the wireless capacity or bells & whistles of the Kindles, & libraries will loan or cheaply rent these.
A lot of libraries gave up on digital music & cut back on movies, for reasons that aren't difficult to understand. Their basic business is the same as it always was: reading materials.
Labels: in the news, what I'm reading
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"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
I saw someone on the bus next to me reading some sort of e book. I was going to ask her about it, but I felt it would be an intrusion ... although next time, I will ask.
Like Bob, I'm old school. I like print. Even in my law practice, I eschew Westlaw for for my print law books (Deerings, or whatever, as long as it is annotated..
Like Bob, I'm old school. I like print. Even in my law practice, I eschew Westlaw for for my print law books (Deerings, or whatever, as long as it is annotated..
I'm neither for nor against. With new technology it is what it is & you just have to see how it develops. While the recording industry was blathering on in the '90s about the awfulness of CD-Rs & the criminality of hip hop sampling, the internet blindsided it.
I realized long ago that for 90% of books I enjoy, it made little sense to pay $20 for what I can get at my library for free. And since I rarely, if ever, read a book twice, my bookshelves are all the lighter for it. Ditto for DVDs.
I am the opposite of Contrarian. I occasionally read a book more than once, but I like hard backs and I have a vast library. I grew up where my grandfather actually had a library room, and have fond memories of him sitting in his big leather chair in that dark paneled room, smoking a pipe, and reading one of his books. I have a small area that I turned into a library of sorts, and I always get interesting comments about it from guests and friends.
I just ordered a small press book of poems, used. I still checked the library first. There's boxes & boxes of books in the other room. few of them have been displayed on shelves. Many are old & rare & beautiful, but probably only some of the paperback Beat era stuff is actually valuable & sellable. I'd get rid of most of them if I could find a home where they would be shelved.
You can always email me a list of books you want to let go of, although I am not so much a fan of paperbacks (yes, I have them) as I am of hardbacks. But, I am not a poem collector or reader. However, just about every other subject I enjoy, from biographies, to fiction, to politics, to science fiction, even history and religion.
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