Quote:
Originally Posted by djgreedo
I disagree. Four or five years ago I had a comparable opinion about MP3 players and digital music. For at least 2 years now I've listened to all my music digitally, and buy most digitally. I have been very surprised at how quickly I went from loving my CD/record collection to sticking them all in boxes and listening on a media center and MP3 player.
It will take longer for ereader devices to reach critical mass, and there are hurdles with electronic books that didn't exist for music (i.e. books are harder to reproduce digitally than music), but generations? I don't think so.
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Recorded music is about a hundred years old, and has gone through several devices in its short life. Wax cylinders, vinyl discs of varying sizes, magnetic tape of varying sizes, CD, digital recordings of a handful of well-known and a double-handful of obscure formats--MP3 on portable players is just another shift in an ever-changing industry.
Paper books, on the other hand, have used the same basic technology for centuries. Books recorded 400 years ago are readable today, unlike music recorded 80 years ago. Also, conversion from paper to digital is not simple or cheap (could be either, for a very tech-savvy person, but for most people it's neither).
And most of the book-reading world does not have computers.
Let me repeat that: Most of the population of the world that reads books, don't own a computer. And aren't going to. Because books are cheap, especially used ones, and computers are not, not even used ones, and computers require an expensive infrastructure to support them.
Most of the world that listens to music, does *not* listen to recorded music. The billion people in China... the majority of them don't have music-playing devices. But they have music. Their use and enjoyment of music will not be affected by whatever packaging or format takes over the music-device world.
Books are not going away for the same reason that synthesizers didn't replace violins, drums, and guitars: because there's a huge populace that's not going to get their entertainment (or education) from an electrically-powered device.
Of course, that populace is under-represented in discussions like these, for obvious reasons. But any thoughts about "when ebooks will replace books" will have to consider how many people read in houses without electrical lighting, much less computers.
It may be less than a generation from major changes in publishing industries, but the market for paper books isn't going to vanish even if the entire NYT bestseller list goes 100% digital.