There is no doubt that the industry is in a period of significant transition. What can we expect 10 to 15 years from now?
Someday, all data and applications will be “in the cloud”—that is, existing independently from, but accessible by, digital devices. All the devices most used every day will then need almost no memory. When we say “screens” in that context, it will mean the same thing as saying “devices” or “computers.” The screens of the future will all connect to all the information and all the computing power all the time.
So, media consumption will take place by people choosing from a wide variety of screen configurations, the way they have always chosen from a wide variety of printed formats. That is, you’ll pick up one kind of screen/device to read a memo you’re working on, another one to look at the work of your favorite photographer, and pull a rolled-up one out of your back pocket to read a book or newspaper on the subway or at the beach. And those don’t include the ones on your walls for a movie, or for a piece of art.
Books don’t have to immediately disappear from a world like that. Print-on-demand (POD) technology means that anybody can have anything they want in book form, down to a press run of one. David Worlock of Outsell, the sagest digital (and longest-standing) guru I know, once told me, “Surely, in time, the number of books created within the network (by individuals via the Internet) must exceed the number of books created outside the network.” If you look at what SharedBook is doing now—enabling personalized books to be created and displayed as flipbooks online, downloaded as PDFs, or printed on-demand—you see the down payment on Worlock’s vision.
Also over time, Wikipedia, Facebook and Google will morph into looking like each other in many ways (that is: search, community and information will all come from the same sources) and the new, meaningful sorting of sources will be vertical: by communities. This is complicated and evolutionary, but here’s a way to think about it: The bookmarks of the person who is your age and also a Yankees fan are a more useful navigation tool for you than what you’ll be offered at ESPN.com or SportsLine.com.
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Umm, Barnes & Noble has been selling used books for maybe 5 years now.
Mike, baby, you're not thinking big enough. Why stop at moving images and links? Why not spoken dialogue? A mood setting soundtrack? Perhaps using actual people and settings to help shortcut all those pesky words? Better yet, virtual reality helmets that project the "reader" directly into the action!
Merely combining mediums won't kill the book. There's a reason people still pick them over similar means of acquiring info. I'm with the other two. In a decade, there will undoubtedly be a device that resembles the idea of the e-Book, and books will routinely be digitalized, but I don't see the good old fashioned book ever really going away.
Overall, good insight. Books distributed by POD offers a lot of opportunities for small publishers. But e-books are a red herring.
In 10 yrs we'll have moved past thinking of e-books as anything like today's e-books. An e-book with links & moving images is a Web site; ridiculous trying to shove that into the more limited container of an e-book. Think beyond the e-book and focus on what is already possible via Web-based content. Many tools now to support Web content rather than retreating to the pre-1990s-like systems represented in today's e-book reading devices, e.g., the new Kindle has 16 shades of gray.
"So, media consumption will take place by people choosing from a wide variety of screen configurations... That is, you’ll pick up one kind of screen/device to read a memo you’re working on, another one to look at the work of your favorite photographer, and pull a rolled-up one out of your back pocket to read a book or newspaper on the subway or at the beach. And those don’t include the ones on your walls for a movie, or for a piece of art."
Yes... or, for a fraction of the price I could have a stack of Post-Its, a photo, a book, an original artwork and a newspaper. How very 20th century of me.
I think 'screens' theory is the new 'food will be replaced by pills' theory. Possible but not desirable.
Books remain the best model for the distribution of book content. They are cheap, user-friendly and proven technologically. The data takes decades to corrode and can be freely redistributed or resold by the end user. They do not crash, require recharging or upgrading.
POD has a big future, eBooks have a distinctly niche future.