Quote:
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?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Maggie Leung
People comparing (dis)similarities between the transition of music and the transition of books. That and meandering, lol.
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The transition from a physical book (pbook) majority to an ebook majority has been a slow process and will likely take a long time. There are many factors in this, such as the issue of DRM. With pbooks, you basically buy a book and can use it anywhere without restriction, but DRM limits a specific ebook to only certain ereaders. This is a strong advantage of pbooks. Another factor is that many types of books (such as comic books) are not fully possible with ebook readers yet, while pbooks can handle any type of book. While ebooks do have advantages over pbooks, it is not the overwhelming advantage when reading that occured in the realm of audio.
Compare this to the movement of music from analog (LP and 45s) to digital (CD). First, CDs were a massive improvement over the formats they replaced: No more needles and cartridges to regularly replace, no more need to clean records before each play for the best sound, no more replacing worn out records (this is a reason why Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon" dropped off the Billboard chart after more than a decade [per Wikipedia]), the ability to instantly go to a specific song, and better long-term sound quality. Added to this is the fact that CDs had no DRM, you could take any CD that you buy anywhere in the world and play it on any CD player in the world. I think the main reason that music transitioned to CD so quickly is that the new format offered so many advantages over the analog formats, with almost no disadvantages.
To close: while I do see ebooks eventually becoming the dominant format for readering, pbooks will still retain a significant place in the reading industry.