Nicolas Negroponte: The Physical Book is Dead in Five Years

[GA Russell]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

2- Having been around the block once or twice, I've seen these kinds of transitions before: from LP to CD, from Video Tape to DVD. In both cases, the transition starts slower than expected, then it hits a critical mass among early adopter consumers, and then retailers bail out *before* the majority of consumers is ready. Do a little digging and you'll find reports of LP buyers griping about being forced to buy CDs because the record stores switched out LPs overnight...

fjt, not to pick nits, but your description of the move from LPs to CDs is not accurate for the US market. In the fall of '88 the record companies informed the American retailers that they would no longer accept returns of vinyl. So the US retailers had little choice but to discontinue carrying the vinyl. Canadian retailers continued to carry vinyl for a year or more after.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by HamsterRage

Analog, by definition, is going to have issues with noise. It also depends heavily on the quality of the media and the playback equipment.

Digital, on the other hand, only has the noise that came along from the recording equipment itself. The digitizing process itself, though, loses some of the qualities of the original sound - it's only an approximation.

It should be noted that CDs are an obsolete format. They were designed to store the data on a media with what we would consider today to have an extremely small capacity. The reason that they haven't been replaced with newer technology is because nobody is going to invest in playback equipment for a newer physical media, especially when people are moving toward downloaded music.

For the vast amount of pop and rock music, it isn't really possible to hear much difference between a CD and an MP3 at 192kbps, and even harder at 256kbps. There's really no reason why digital formats in the future can't run at much higher sample rates or use more bits per sample, all of which will shrink the difference between analog and digital.

A quick Google search came up with an article that indicated that digital sales would outstrip CD sales in 2010.

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

Amazon's now doing their mp3s at 320kbps. I also do my rips at that sample rate. Even that high of a rate is roughly 1/10 the size of a wave file. One would have to have some really good equipment and an even better ear to hear the difference.

I think a factor in the format of digital file formats is the limitations of technology due to cost and space. In the past memory was extremely expensive so digital audio players had a very small capacity by today's standard. When I bought my first MP3 player, I chose a CD/MP3 player because it was more affordable than a flash player for the same amount of capacity (700mb) and I could quickly load more music without needing to connect my player to a computer.

One of the main reasons that compressed audio formats were important was due to the limited capacity of audio players. With compression, you can fit a relatively large amount of music in a small amount of storage. In the above example, it was possible for me to fit more than 10 hours of compressed music on one CD.

Now, the limitations of storage capacity and cost have been significantly reduced. Now, 16gb flash audio players are not uncommon and that's enough space to store 21 uncompressed CDs and this amount can be increased via the use of lossless audio formats (like FLAC).

One factor that I see that works against improved audio formats is the "good enough" factor. For many people, CDs are good enough and it is also good enough when a digital audio format sounds the same as a CD even if it is lossy.

Another factor that works against better audio formats is that they tend to be locked down with DRM to prevent things like copying and freely using the music the way you want. One advantage that true CDs have over many formats is that they are not locked down with DRM and can be played on any CD player.

This is one of the reasons I continue to purchase CDs and I only began purchasing music on line when it became available without DRM. If I can't rip a CD and put on my digital audio player, I cannot buy the CD. It is the same downloaded music, if I have to jump through DRM hoops to play music on my audio player, I will pass on purchasing the music.

[Kumabjorn]

How on earth did a post about NN's prognosis about the future of e-books slide into vinyl vs. CDs?

[Maggie Leung]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

How on earth did a post about NN's prognosis about the future of e-books slide into vinyl vs. CDs?

People comparing (dis)similarities between the transition of music and the transition of books. That and meandering, lol.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Oh, look! A butterfly!

[Maggie Leung]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

Oh, look! A butterfly!

Where? I was chasing the bunny that just hopped by....

[Ea]

Originally Posted by jgaiser

Interesting... So your willing to pay 50% more money for a CD rather than buying the MP3s from Amazon/iTunes? Very curious...

Most of what I buy is not available as digital downloads (indie folk music), or can usually be had quite cheap (classical and jazz). And I'm often also interested in the booklet. I'm right now considering buying Cecilia Bartoli's Sacrificium, which I can probably actually buy as a digital download - the booksized booklet itself is worth the purchase of the actual physical CD.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by Ea

Most of what I buy is not available as digital downloads (indie folk music), or can usually be had quite cheap (classical and jazz). And I'm often also interested in the booklet...

What she said.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

fjt, not to pick nits, but your description of the move from LPs to CDs is not accurate for the US market. In the fall of '88 the record companies informed the American retailers that they would no longer accept returns of vinyl. So the US retailers had little choice but to discontinue carrying the vinyl. Canadian retailers continued to carry vinyl for a year or more after.

In my area most retailers had already shrunk vinyl to essentially zero long before 88. <shrug> Couldn't swear to it without research but I'm pretty sure retailers switched to CD as their cash cow circa 1985-86. (I was a holdout til then. I took it as a sign to start shopping for a CD player when the new LPs were moved to what had been the bargain bin section.)

Edit: Here's a timeline that shows the transition complete by '89:
http://www.soc.duke.edu/~s142tm01/history4.html


The reason why the record companies stopped taking returns? The economics changed, right? We do agree that customer willingness to stick with a deprecated format does not guarantee its availability?

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

How on earth did a post about NN's prognosis about the future of e-books slide into vinyl vs. CDs?

Here!
I brought it up as an example of the economics of mass market retailing.

It can be argued that print books will endure as a high-priced niche product for diehards much as LPs did for audio.
Also, LPs are an example of a product that became uneconomic to sell long before the majority of the market was ready to abandon it, which I suspect is going to make Negroponte more correct that he otherwise would be.

Don't quite see it as off-topic, myself, but if it offends...

[Kumabjorn]

Not offensive, merely confusing.

[RyanMWilliams]

Originally Posted by J. Strnad

I think that public libraries will be among the first to dump them. They don't have the money to maintain the purchases and shelf space. You'll have to go to private collectors (and there are lots of book hoarders) to find print books.

I don't think so. Public libraries tend to support old formats longer than many other places. Libraries that circulated AV clung to music cassettes, LPs, etc. much longer than most people would have thought. They will expand their digital collections but it's going to take time.

On the other hand certain private/academic libraries have already ditched print in favor of digital.

[nbvanyoos]

The promise was the PC was going to replace all paper at its advent. Look at printer and copier sales and tell me if that has happened yet. We will always have some form of non-electronic media for the written word. Fiction will be the first to go away from paperbacks, followed eventually by non-fiction once schools demand electronic versions. Universities will be first followed by private and then public schools. Students can't haul all those books around anymore, so the prevailing impetus will be toward the electronic medium.

Costs on multi-use devices will drop to commodity prices, making the device more like the calculators students use today. A $139 Kindle is cheaper than Texas Instruments latest iteration of their calculator. My school was supposed to be "bookless" when it was built over a decade ago, but the publishers wouldn't support it. Another problem with public school adoption is the WiFi and 4G built into these devices. Right now, school districts strictly control Internet access, so this will become a major issue in adopting these devices. Ten years seems more realistic than five.

[Maggie Leung]

Originally Posted by RyanMWilliams

I don't think so. Public libraries tend to support old formats longer than many other places. Libraries that circulated AV clung to music cassettes, LPs, etc. much longer than most people would have thought. They will expand their digital collections but it's going to take time.

On the other hand certain private/academic libraries have already ditched print in favor of digital.

That's because public entities hafta serve everyone, and they get their money incrementally. A private school has options, for instance. Big fund drive, one large gift, increased tuition and fees, dipping into endowments, etc. Also, they decide they wanna do something, they don't have as many constituencies to serve. They answer to fewer people. Government entities are always more unwieldy, more bureaucratic, more watered-down in efforts. A public library serves rich and poor. They hafta balance access and their spending trickles in, especially in a bad economy. Hello, bottleneck.

The technology is available. How things get done in the public sector has not changed. Money comes slowly, changes in textbooks go through screening processes, etc. Check out computers and other tech equipment in schools. A lot of outdated equipment. It's not because computers aren't affordable or readily available. Schools have a hard time coming up with a big chunk of money all at once, so they upgrade incrementally.

[GA Russell]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

The reason why the record companies stopped taking returns? The economics changed, right? We do agree that customer willingness to stick with a deprecated format does not guarantee its availability?

Oh yes, I agree with your main point.