Revolutions in Reading

[soulfuldog]

Originally Posted by joehunt

If you would put aside your anti-Amazon bias for just a moment and re-read the list

<Does not compute, ignore and post anyway. Repeat.>

Really interesting thread but agree with the popularisation of the internet being in there and possibly the Galaxy Note not. And print media for news has declined rapidly, whereas other print has declined and levelled off, books are a different thing altogether.

[howyoudoin]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

This may be relevant:

Why newspaper markets are growing in China and India, while they decline in the US and UK

Where I live, newspapers are collapsing, with circulation down by half, and advertising revenue fallen much more sharply.

Re paper books in the US:

Strange as it may seem, we know of no reliable, publicly-available way to get comprehensive statistics for book sales . . .

My impression is that sales of bound books are holding up much better, in the US, than periodicals. Book shelf space, in stores, is way down, but a lot of that is due to Amazon selling loads of printed paper.

Is the US a leading indicator for the rest of the world? Don't know.

I do think a decline world-wide will happen at some point in the future when the developing nations too move on to electronic media, but it's not happening now. From a universal perspective, a growth in print of even 15% in India and China (but not restricted to just those two nations) offsets the losses in the developed world purely by virtue of the larger populations in the developing world. With rising literacy, this can only grow for years to come.

Media conglomerates will cope just fine by setting up subsidiaries in the emerging markets. Local newspapers in the developed world will lack this ability to leverage global reach, but on the flip side local newspapers in the emerging markets couldn't be happier with their increasing circulations.

If one considers localised pockets like the developed countries, print is in decline. But looking at the overall picture, I don't think one would be wrong in stating that print is definitely still a growing medium.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You made a major mistake. It's not the Amazon Kindle that should be listed. It's the Sony LIBRIé eBook Reader (2004) that should be listed as it is the first eInk Reader. The Kindle is not the first and if not for Sony, there might not be a Kindle.

...and if not for a Kindle, it is arguable whether there would be an eInk industry at all.

The LIBRIé failed in the U.S. market place. And the status of the current Sony eInk 'industry' is like a good old-fashioned Ma and Pa Kettle black-and-white film from the 1940s....moribund, extinct. But still enjoyable, if one likes to reminisce.

The Kindle (the last time I looked) is still going strong....

[QuantumIguana]

The e-book was revolutionary, but you really can't point to any particular e-reader and say "This was revolutionary." With Edison's light bulb and phonograph, with Bell's phonograph, you can point to a particular device and say "That was revolutionary."

[LadyKate]

For me it was my old ipaq in 2000 that started me using a device to read. With the ms reader for lit files and a couple of other apps I forget the name of for text and html files I was able to read in bed with no lights on

I used various models of ipaqs until about three years ago and still have a couple of functional ones around collecting dust but find I prefer my samsung 7 inch tablet due to screen size.

I remember when baen started including a rather large number of non related books including the book purchased in various ebook formats when buying a hard cover copy of a new release in 2002.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by joehunt

If you would put aside your anti-Amazon bias for just a moment and re-read the list, you will see it says "Amazon Kindle (2007) - popularised e-ink reading devices" which cannot be denied

This has nothing to do with Amazon except that Amazon should not be in the list. Sony should since they made the very first eInk Reader and without that, the Kindle would not exist.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

...and if not for a Kindle, it is arguable whether there would be an eInk industry at all.

The LIBRIé failed in the U.S. market place. And the status of the current Sony eInk 'industry' is like a good old-fashioned Ma and Pa Kettle black-and-white film from the 1940s....moribund, extinct. But still enjoyable, if one likes to reminisce.

The Kindle (the last time I looked) is still going strong....

The LIBRIé was never released in the US. The first eInk device released in the US was the PRS-500.

[barryem]

Originally Posted by crane3

The list should include the Palm(s) as the really 1st ereader

I do agree that the Palm should be on that list but it wasn't even close to being the first ereader. Xerox Parc laboratories developed an ereading program for their experimental portable computer the Dynabook sometime in the 1970's after Micheal Hart invented the ebook as we know it today in 1971. Sony made ebook discs available for their Data Discman in 1992.

My first exposure to ebooks was with an app called the Vertical Reader on my HP100lx, probably about 1993. A lot of people, me included, were scanning books and exchanging them with one another on Compuserve and on BBS systems then. It was done on a pretty small scale so no-one really cared. Even Compuserve, who had strictly enforced policies against piracy on their site, never cared about exchanging books. I don't think it occurred to anyone in those days that their might be legal issues.

The Palm Pilot didn't come along till several years later.

However, you're right that it was the device that first began to popularize ebooks. The earlier ways to read were more novelty than anything else. I did read quite a few books on my 100lx and later on my 200lx but it was when I got my first Palm that I started taking ebooks seriously.

By the way, I didn't have all those dates in my head. I just did a little googling to get my memories in a row before posting this reply.

[edited]
I posted the stuff above after reading the comment about Palms and before reading the rest of the posts, which I now see was a mistake. There were a lot of good thoughts expressed that might have changed what I said. But I'll leave it be and just add that I think we're all correct and at the same time we're all wrong.

Ereading is still new and, while I think we can all agree that there's a very profound revolution going on in reading, it's really just begun. Maybe a century from now we'll have enough perspective to decide what the high points of that revolution were. At the moment I don't think we can even say for certain that we've seen the important milestones yet. And we sure can't have much idea where all this is going yet.

I do love threads like this one. They're thought provoking and meaty and fun. Kind of like the discussions my friends and I had in our teens in the 1950's about where the world was headed. We made all sorts of fantastical predictions and it turns out we were still way too conservative.

Barry