Last Thursday Apple announced a new way for textbooks to be both published and distributed to students. It is another step in disruptive practices that continues to erode a publishing model that has existed for five hundred years. Digital is here to stay. It will continue to change the way we both publish and consume the written word. The following article was co-authored with my CTO Chris Skaggs of Code-Monkeys. It is a call for seeing digital publishing in a new light.
We've had many conversations in the last year with various people in the publishing and education world. By and large the experience has gone something like this:
Let me be clear. I too am a bibliophile. I love all kinds of books. I read Sandra Boynton to my kids and then Pushkin. I grew up devouring Sherlock Holmes and Homer. Despite my better judgment, Easton Press catalogs have become for me what the old Sears toy catalog used to be. So I really do understand the joy of reading.
But what I really love most about books is what they contain.
Don't get me wrong -- nothing is quite like the smell of old or new pages and the first crack of a spine. A tall stack of dusty tomes is enough to make me giddy. So please don't think I don't understand and experience the real pleasure a book can bring just for the sake of its very existence.
But I do find myself troubled by the folks who seem to treat books as a kind of idol. It is almost always associated with a notion that somehow books are natural and an iPad is un-natural. It is insinuated that books are somehow morally superior to a Kindle because of a never-quite-articulated notion that electronic devices pull people apart and discourage both community and intelligence.
Books were one of the most disruptive technologies ever invented , but they are also remarkably good for humanity. Socrates feared that writing would destroy the 'life of the mind' he loved so much. European theologians called the printing press the 'work of the Devil.' And when books became commonplace many intellectuals bemoaned the way salons were dying and that people were no longer talking to one another. Telephones were expected to destroy writing. The train was predicted to destroy communities all together.
Human nature is both communal and curious. When disruptive technologies appear, there is always a period of adjustment and adoption that unquestionably alters existing behavior. Technology though, can never really change who we are.
As eBooks explode in popularity and the iPad reigns as the most quickly adopted new technology ever, there is often a fifth step to the pattern I described above... Our aforementioned sub-50 publisher returns to us, sometimes sheepishly, 'Remember that thing we talked about 18 months ago? Can we bring that back up again?'
Of course we can my friend. After all, we're all in this together.
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But I make more money from ebooks than I do print books, so as an author I'm excited for the future. It opens up opportunities for authors with small presses to see an explosion of sales and readers from all over the world; thanks to that New Fangledy thang called The Infernal Internalnet (old people like to make up words they think're cute) and all those other scary other electronicled doo-daderoos. So, in my Oldness, I find print books lovely. But, lately, I've read more on my Kindle (and lust after an iPad, etc) and find the experience just as pleasurable.
Me bones are a-achin' so I bes' git m'se'f back to my rocker - so hard being OLD, or I could go on a hike up the mountain and then settle back with a book I just downloaded. Hot Damn, over 50 is the new under 50, right? :-D *kiss*
Archaeologists and historical researchers can read documents from hundreds and even thousands of years ago. If a person knows what they are looking for, even punch tape and cards can be visually read. Yet already few computer are available which can read a tape or Bernoulli drives and the common 3.5 inch floppy too is disappearing fast. If discovered many years later, data on them may remain inaccessible, as there would be no method to retrieve it.
Printed books, though not forever, are as close to it as one could imagine.
My dad still has some old IBM punchcards that are now basically used to write grocery lists.
And again, why would they want to build a tape drive? To retrieve the content. For the archaeologists the goal of their research will not be to recreate a user experience, it will be to see what people wrote, what they said and what they thought.
As well, while one argument against paper books is that they kill trees, the ecological impact of electronics (especially the First World custom of buying a new gadget every year) is often minimized. And as Steamchip explains above, books have no formatting problems.