“Books are dinosaur media?”
The MIT media lab squandered a boatload of cash (I believe it is in the tens, to hundreds, of millions) on a project looking for the electronic replacement to paper.
I guess I applaude the audacity of such a project, and I have no doubt that it has likely resulted in many patents, the idea that paper is obsolete is ridiculous on its face.
Paper is the least expensive and most dependable method of recording written information in a permanent way.
If it requires electricity to maintain, then a record isn’t a record.
Saying that, e-books are an efficient way of toting around a bunch of books. I’d be nervous about reading a Kindle in the pool. I fall asleep and dunk my paperback, I’m out $12 max maybe. Do the same thing with a Kindle and I’m out $189++.
I told my wife to wait about two years and she can pick one up for about $40 or so. Nothing magical about a Kindle.
Woe betide the company that locks their books into a format. Apple can tell you that it leads to single digit market share over time.
Here is some more food for thought on the history of humankind’s communication systems.
A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, Volume I – to 1933
Erick Barnouw
Oxford University Press, New York, 1966
INTRODUCTION
Pg 3
Every medium of information has made names – and meanwhile, values. New media have meant new values. Since the dawn of history, each new medium has tended to undermine an old monopoly, shift the definitions of goodness and greatness, and alter the climate of men’s lives.
In ancient Egypt, the transition from stone – as in the pyramids – to papyrus as transmitter of truth, prestige, and doctrine seems to have brought on or encouraged many other changes. Because papyrus was portable, it helped rulers exercise authority over wide areas. But the power now had to be shared with armies of copyists, and the literate became a privileged class. Because papyrus was scarce, control of its production became crucial, and again this meant a sharing of royal power, in this case the managers of productivity. All this meant a shift away from absolute monarchy, a dispersal of authority, that is said to have penetrated deeply into Egyptian life. Papyrus begat bureaucracy.
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the arrival of paper in Europe began to undermine a church monopoly of knowledge, which had been based on the scarcity of parchment and on the skills of monastery copyists. Ample supplies of paper now encouraged the development of printing, and spread written communications to new fields and ideas. It became an instrument in the growth of trade, the rise of the vernacular, and the spread of heretical ideas via tract, story and image. It reinforced the rise of merchant, lawyer, explorer, scientist. The chain reactions echoed through centuries.