I have a thought that I can't quite fit into a tweet. It has something to do with Ned Resnikoff's post on e-books, and Freddie deBoer's response. But not directly.
Lurking behind the question "Is the printed book dead?" is an assumption that the e-book has the power to kill the printed book. We've all seen formats kill other formats: the DVD killed video cassettes, and streaming video could easily kill the DVD. The CD killed vinyl (sort of), and MP3 and streaming audio could well kill the CD. And so one might think that, just as digital music and movies displaced analog, digital books will replace physical books.
But CDs, vinyl records, video cassettes, and DVDs all require some mediating piece of technology, and nobody wants to maintain a whole bunch of these devices. So when our CD players break, we replace them iPod docks. Books (codices, to be specific), don't require a mediating gadget — anyone who can read a book's language can just pick it up and use it — so printed books aren't as easy to displace. A both-and solution for e-books and p-books is therefore much more plausible than it is for audio and video.
140-word reductions of this post will be welcomed.
2 comments:
I think you're right, but I think there are also several other important considerations -- chiefly, what the publishing industry is going to look like in another ten years. I have not done any of the math, but it seems like we could reach a point where e-readers proliferate enough that a critical mass of shoppers are buying the big titles (the money makers) in electronic form, to a degree where it no longer makes financial sense to maintain printing presses, at least on the scale we do now. At which point the codex still exists as a consumer item, but (not that this is a new idea) as more an art object than a commodity.
I mean, what ultimately killed VHS wasn't just that people didn't want to maintain the gadget in the middle; it was that DVDs promised a bunch of neat features at a reasonable price. And after not too long, even a professional VCR repairperson or serious VHS aficionado (who presumably only exists for the purposes of this argument) couldn't keep using the medium, unless they only wanted to watch things made before 2002. The choice was made for them.
Still, I think you're right that this is why the codex has been so durable, and I hope it will continue to be, at a decent price.
"...to a degree where it no longer makes financial sense to maintain printing presses, at least on the scale we do now."
I know nothing about the expense of printing presses, so you could be right. If you find someone who's done the math, let me know!
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