E-books, Again · 8 June 2001
Books are serious, they capture our knowledge, our intellectual heritage, our cultural discourse. Books have significance that transcends quarrels about who gets paid, and when, and how often, for playing popular tunes.
— one of many jabs at the ‘content’ industry from a swaggering, exhaustive and quite excellent paper by Clifford Lynch entitled The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World.
The sentimentally framed questions about digital books and electronic devices replacing printed books are largely irrelevant, an artificial and distracting controversy.
Exactly. Ignoring Nicholson Baker’s loony call to preserve crumbling newspapers, the relative benefits of digital and print media have been clearly defined for years, coexisting without the world coming to an end.
Proprietary readers are toast, however. If journalists would cut through the hype of Adobe and Microsoft press releases, and if those companies – and their attendant hangers-on – would stop fellating their shareholders and take a look at this thing called the Web surging under their noses, they’d understand that the momentum behind digital distribution of ‘content’ has already crushed the possibility of gimmick appliances ever being viable.
Produce a high-resolution tablet computer that will do everything a laptop can do, then you’ll have something resembling an e-book solution. A computer.
* * *