[WEB4LIB] NYT magazine piece on e-books

[Roy Tennant]

Quote from the article cited below:

"In the near future, books will cost little or nothing, never go out of
print and remain eternally available throughout the wired world."

Is this guy on drugs? Hey, the last time I checked music CDs cost *more*
than LPs, even though they were much cheaper to make. Since when is the
publishing industry going to start giving this stuff away? Never go out of
print? If you want any chance to retain copyright in this "wired world"
you must keep a very tight grip on your content. So what happens to this
content when a publisher with a proprietary format goes belly-up?
Eternally available? He clearly doesn't have the first clue about digital
preservation issues.

He spends most of the brief piece saying how much he enjoys his Rocket
eBook (which is fine), and then quickly polishes off the "literary
technophobes" by quoting the most radical and painting them in terms like
"hostile", "misguided", and "jaded". Now here is the kind of informed
debate I expect of the New York Times (not).

This paean to e-books just adds to the pile of hype about e-books and
unfortunately does nothing to prepare people for the *real* world in which
they will find themselves -- a mix of print and digital. Television did
not kill radio for some very good reasons. E-books will not kill print
ones for the same basic reason -- they are simply better at different
things. Then add in all the legacy stuff which will *never* be digital,
and you've got one complicated (but interesting) world. Welcome to real
life, Jacob Weisberg, not the simplistic "wired world" you envision.
Roy

On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Sloan, Bernie wrote:

> 
> An interesting (and brief) article on e-books from yesterday's New York
> Times Magazine:
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000604mag-ebook.html
> 
> Bernie Sloan
> Senior Library Information Systems Consultant
> University of Illinois Office for Planning and Budgeting
> 338 Henry Administration Building
> 506 S. Wright Street
> Urbana, IL  61801
> Phone:  (217) 333-4895
> Fax:      (217) 333-6355
> E-mail:  bernies at uillinois.edu
> 
>