the past, present and future of e-books
I bought a couple books from Peanut Press back when I used a Palm, nearly ten years ago. John Siracusa worked on their website, and is sharing his experiences and understanding of the e-book market. He covers everything from the technology to the insane relationship between publishers and booksellers. There are so many golden quotes here that I’m not sure where to start, but here’s one of my favorites:
All of the arguments about screen quality and medium/content separation crumble to dust in the face of these inconvenient truths: broadly speaking, people aren’t buying e-books; people don’t want e-books; people do not want to read book-length texts off of a screen. Or, to paraphrase a long-forgotten but nevertheless surprisingly applicable movie from the 90s, people love their books.
But the truth is, these things always turn out the same way. And I have some bad news for the bibliophiles. The beloved, less technically sophisticated information conveyance with the pedigreed history doesn’t win. To put it bluntly, people die.
