But e-books won’t stay on the periphery of book publishing much longer. E-book hardware is on the verge of going mainstream. More dedicated e-readers are coming, with ever larger screens. So, too, are computer tablets that can serve as giant e-readers, and hardware that will not be very hard at all: a thin display flexible enough to roll up into a tube.
With the new devices in hand, will book buyers avert their eyes from the free copies only a few clicks away that have been uploaded without the copyright holder’s permission? Mindful of what happened to the music industry at a similar transitional juncture, book publishers are about to discover whether their industry is different enough to be spared a similarly dismal fate.
This is what has been predicted for a time now by visionaries like Kevin Kelly and others. The publishers will have to come up with a new business model. Of course authors and publishers have to make money! But they can no longer do it by keeping knowledge and thoughts away from the public. The internet is democratizing all knowledge. The model of charging someone for information will have to change.
Total e-book sales, though up considerably this year, remained small, at $81.5 million, or 1.6 percent of total book sales through July.
This is partly because of the resistance of some publishers to see Amazon as their friend. Despite their high-tech approach they are still following an outdated business model. They are a transitional force.
We do know that people have been helping themselves to digital music without paying. When the music industry was “Napsterized” by free file-sharing, it suffered a blow from which it hasn’t recovered.
This is a curious statement to make since record companies for decades have been "helping themselves" to the work of artists, stealing from them and in some cases not even paying them royalties (James Brown).
A report earlier this year by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, based on multiple studies in 16 countries covering three years, estimated that 95 percent of music downloads “are unauthorized, with no payment to artists and producers.”
After verifying that each file claiming to be the book actually was, Attributor reported that 166 copies of the e-book were available on 11 sites. RapidShare accounted for 102.
Publishers and authors are about the only groups that go unmentioned. Ms. Scheid, of RapidShare, has advice for them if they are unhappy that her company’s users are distributing e-books without paying the copyright holders: Learn from the band Nine Inch Nails. It marketed itself “by giving away most of their content for free.”
It is funny to think back on how things used to be. Now we can sign on to the internet so easy as through the computer, phone or ipod. No one thinks about doing these things anymore when before it was amazing if you were able to get a lot of things done on the internet because dial up would take so long. The internet used to be so boring as now we are able to do things that we were never able to do before.
The idea that this world we are building is somehow diminishing communication is all wrong. In fact, it's enhancing communication. It is allowing all kinds of new language.
Many people seem to worry that communication is only based over computers now and that relationships are diminishing. I feel that relationships are just growing and experiencing new things. Instead of constantly worrying about how to approach things people are now able to find different ways to do things. It is opening a whole new world to us and allowing us to experience new things.
You can't download it. That's the whole point. You want to download it so that you can read it like a book. But that's precisely what it can't be. You want it to be data, but it's experience.
With the internet, it seems that people continually compare this to a book and want to make it look like a book. Books are all that we have known up to this point so when reading things online we feel the need to make it look like a book. We need to realize that the internet is a whole new experience rather than comparing it to what we are used to experiencing. We need to get out of the idea in our head that it is all about the experience rather than concrete data that we are looking at.
There will be lots of things that will be similar to the physical world, and there will be lots of things that will be different. But it's going to be a space that's going to have a lot of the attributes that we like in reality--a richness, a sense of place, a place to be silent, a place to go deep.
It is hard to get used to something that is continually changing. People have to realize that with the ever changing world of technology things will constantly be different for us. We will still be able to do some things that we can experience in reality but there are some things that will be different. It is a whole new experience that we have to accept and a whole new idea that people have to learn to accept. We cannot push away technology we have to embrace it.