Saturday, March 14, 2009

Customer's Choice

So publishers and distributors are finally coming to the realization that it's all about customer's having the option to choose, whether it's what platform they want to read content on...or apparently even what price to pay for that content.
And according to Mike Shatzkin's article Will You Recognize the Industry in 10 Years? this will extend to e-books not only having links, but moving photos...kind of like in the Harry Potter world.

So if e-books will have links to videos and the web, will TVs have links to the web and to pdfs of text? Why can't TVs be large e-book devices too that get synched up to the smaller portable device you take with you? But how does that work with a family and their separate devices?

And when do we stop being publishers and just become part of the larger entertainment business? And does it matter as long as we're still dealing with the words we love?
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1 comment:

Mark W.F. Condon said...

From the historic publishing industry, all that is changing is the role of printing, binding and distribution, the 2D artifacts of sharing our words on paper and the logistics of moving lots of printed, heavy, and unsold books around the planet.

Sure, the new media are more entertaining, but provocative thought and scintillating images in the mind of the reader will still come from the weaving of wondrous words.

Editors and authors have a bright future, so long as they can adjust to the context where those words will be seen in the future.

March 15, 2009 at 4:04 PM

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