The future of the book
Photo: Thomas Hardy’s study at Max Gate.
The disembodied book
The age of the printed book is drawing to a close. But there’s no need to mourn its passing, says Jürgen Neffe
In the shadows of the global financial crisis of the early 21st century, another revolution is gathering pace, whose repercussions reach far beyond the current correctable economic buckling. It impact on the world will compare with Gutenberg’s. And with it, the era of the printed book will come to a close. Dissolved digitally like sound and image beforehand, limitlessly copyable, globally downloadable by the million with the click of a mouse, the book is entering the world of multimedia like its disembodied cousins from film, photography and music. This is the disintegration of the oldest serially produced data carrier in terms of form and content. (Continue reading.)
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
May 19th, 2009 at 21:12
There’s a local almost ubiquitous store in the country called CD-RKING and they’re sort of a legit version of sellers of hardcore china-made consumer electronics, as wide a variety as from FIREWIRE cards for those pc owners who want to transfer video files FinalCut-like to, well, blank cd-r. What makes them also popular si their wide selection of MP4 players, which although play really bad acoustics and have no reliable battery time, are really a treasure for serious readers because of the Kindle-like feature called Note Reader. It’s surprisingly good and worth advertising about since I believe Kindle doesn’t really apply in the country and the cost of ALL the netbooks and e-readers available in the market seems to even lower readership rate. This is a timely answer in case the government tax on books push through.
I finished reading The Prince and some of D.F. Wallace’s short stories using the MP4 and reading never felt darn right (post)modern.