From the NEW YORK TIMES today: “Turning Page, E-Books Start to Take Hold”
And you can hear the tortured screams of bibliophiles everywhere. Personally, I’m holding off on getting a Kindle or any other ebook reader — while I love the feel of hot new technology in my grasping hands, I feel that it’s prudent to wait for the product to improve (and to clear out the 70+ TBR books on my shelves before adding a device that will make my TBR woes worse).
However, while I will always have a soft place in my heart for printed books, and while I will likely want to have them in copious amounts even if I start using a reader as my primary content provider, ebook readers are the way of the future. I think at some point in the future, we will all just have a handheld screen with us that serves as our television, our movie theatre, our stereo, our library, and our online lifeline. If you read sci-fi, you may also see it as a grim, new-world-order harbinger of the days when our global overlords will use it to provide an endless stream of propaganda, but I’ll take my chances.
And really, is this that much different than the advent of the printing press? I would bet you a copy of my yet-to-be-published book that when the Gutenberg Bible first arrived, there were legions of monks who were (piously, quietly) up in arms about the death of the hand-printing industry, with all the same concerns about quality, look-and-feel, and relative cost as we’re hearing from the publishing industry today. And yet what ended up happening was a revolution in terms of availability of information to the masses, information that would change the world. Ebook readers offer the same promise — give kids excellent stories on the same screen that currently provides them with movies, and you might see a reading rebirth that no one could have predicted when musty old paper volumes were the only path to readership.
What do you think? Are you rushing out to buy a reader, or are you holding out until the last page is ripped from your hands?
Posted on 24 December 2008 * 1 Comment
Tags: Prognostications * Scenes from the Interweb * The Industry * Writing Life *
