Feb 17 2010
Another “death of the paper book” post
This time, it’s from a blog I follow called – Psychotactics –, and it’s using the Christmas day Amazon.com stats (the day that ebooks first outstripped tree-books in unit sales terms. This wasn’t in terms of revenue, because as I blogged before, an enormous number of the ebooks downloaded for Kindle were free, or very low cost.
Picture the scene – all across America, gift wrapping was torn asunder, and Kindle boxes were excitedly opened. So the first thing everyone wants to do is to start filling the things up with books. At a price point of $0.00, it’s just so darned tempting to download everything you can see. It’s a bit like an “all-you-can-eat” buffet breakfast.
It’s an interesting blog post though. Have a read through it – HERE –. Like me, they consider the announcement of the – Apple iPad – to be hugely significant, which will propel electronic reading forwards, and maybe even help the uptake of rich media content.
I agree with the points you make in this post about the ebooks downloaded being either free, or very low-cost. But one other thing I think the author hasn’t considered enough, in between his definitive proclamations about ‘business’ and ‘sentimentality’, is just how deeply the paper book is ingrained into the collective history and consciousness of the world. Books vs. CDs isn’t really a just comparison, because CDs were only ever a single step along the evolution of the ‘device containing recorded music’, together with gramophone records and cassette tapes. It was inevitable that they would give way to something better in due course. But although the size, presentation, printing and binding of books has evolved, books are still books, right? Writing on sheaves of paper. It’s been around for hundreds of years, and that’s not something which will just go away, even in the face of such an apparently superior alternative. Plus, as you say, prices of ebooks are an issue. x3