New media guru Nicholas Negroponte recently proclaimed the death of the physical book within five years:
The physical book is dead, according to Negroponte. He said he
realizes that’s going to be hard for a lot of people to accept. But
you just have to think about film and music. In the 1980s, the writing
was on the wall that physical film was going to die, even though
companies like Kodak were in denial. He then asked people to think
about their youth with music. It was all physical then. Now everything
has changed.
Negroponte, fortunately, qualified his death sentence:
By “dead,” he of course doesn’t mean completely dead. But he means
that digital books are going to replace physical books as the dominant
form. His argument is related to his One Laptop per Child Foundation.
On those laptops, he can include hundreds or thousands of books. If
you think about trying to ship that many physical books to the
emerging world for each child, it would be impossible, he reasons.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/physical-book-dead/
I welcome the arrival of new media, and particalarly different kinds of e-books and e-readers. However, Negroponte is probably far too negative about the future of the printed, physical book. Here I share the opinion of the CEO of the publishing giant Random House, Markus Dohle, who thinks that printed books will still dominate "for a long time to come".
The market share for electronic books, even in the United States, will
more likely be between 25 and 50 percent by 2015. But this development
still represents a huge opportunity for us. It creates new growth. I
meet people in America who say: I started reading again because of my
e-reader -- and so did my children.
http://www.spiegel.de/
And I am convinced that here will always be a demand for beautifully produced printed books - the kind of books printed by e.g. the Folio Society in London.
http://www.foliosociety.com/
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