










Your time starts now.

Game on.



After rant:






excellent post thank you

Andy I enjoyed reading your post, thank you.

you make some great points and I agree with you, the whole eBooks vs paper books argument is getting us nowhere and frankly it's pointless. Paper books have their place and advantages, as do eBooks... and as technologies continue to evolve some of the advantages currently held by paper books have will move over to eBooks, but paper will always have it place.

as to DRM, I personally believe it will eventually disappear, the same way it did in the music industry (you only have to look at iTunes and the majority of other online music providers to see that)... the same will happen in the movie and TV industries, and it's likely to be a lot sooner than we imagine (let's face it, BluRay was the winner of the "last" physical format war). VHS tapes and recordable DVD's didn't kill the Movie industry, the same way recordable CD's didn't kill the music industry, it's still going and making plenty of money. Yes those industries have transformed in recent years and they will continue to evolve, but they're still going... the publishing industry will go the same way, and as you say, those that embrace the changes will prosper, while those that resist won't.

"It's not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change" Charles Darwin may have been writing about a different subject, but it's easy to apply the same principle to business... publishing houses that bury their heads in the sand or live in denial will become extinct.

as I posted on my personal blog only a few days ago "If a competitor is hell bent on pushing forwards when you’re content to sit still, don’t be surprised when they win”

Brendan Mitchell

DRM and Paper are here to stay

I had a similar reaction when I heard Amazon saying they'd sold more eBooks than hardbacks. It's great to know other people also saw through this. Still, it's encouraging news for the eBook.

I met Steve Potash (Overdrive) at the last Frankfurt Book Fair, and if memory serves me correctly, Overdrive were (in 2009) very happy with their progress within US libraries and eBook/Audiobook lending. Ebooks in libraries is certainly much more widespread in N. America than in the UK, and although DRM is not something I like for general consumers, I think it will always be something that has to exist for libraries; DRM allows books to be lent, and then to expire at an appropriate date. Without it, libraries will just become a peer-to-peer portal for pirates.

The comment above talks about the need to continue having physical books. Absolutely. I fully expect libraries will continue to stock these, but for the lending public, I don't see how eBooks will not become a dominant lending format.

An Often Ignored Issue

Textual Fixity - A printed book of a specific edition can be referenced and will ALWAYS say the same thing, but an electronic book doesn't have the same permenance --if you reference an electronic work, there's nothing to prevent it from being changed (corrections made, etc.) and therefore no longer supporting your own work. Much scholarship is built on the work of others, but it becomes more difficult to build on a shifting foundation --and electronic work doesn't have the permanence and unchangability of the printed word.

An example - Bowker's Books in Print was a book published every year showing the books that were in-print for that year. This and a lot of reference items are now only produced electronically. In the future, someone doing research may want that information for certain years --prior to 2000, there would be no problem, but after that, they would have to rely electronic information which may or may not be accessable. For example, is the data constantly updated --future researchers will not be able to get a snapshot in time. Or maybe the previous editions are only on CD-ROMs --but in twenty years, that may be as hard to read as a 5 1/4" floppy disk is today --or maybe harder. Also, how long does electronic information remain uncorrupted?

Geneaologists often use city directories and phone books --but if they stop being printed, what will be used in 100 years. We may have several decades at the beginning of the 21st century that will be harder to do research on than the previous 150 years.

Thank you!

I love this post! I wish I'd written it myself.

DRM is the big question

The evolution of DRM is what will determine the role of public libraries in digital distribution. In a pay-per-use digital world, there would be no justification for library participation. E.g. Freegal. It's one thing to purchase a book in the context of building a rounder collection for library members to browse and use. It's another thing to pool our money to buy things for individuals that can't be used again without repurchasing. The first is cooperative purchasing and sharing. The latter is a transfer of wealth. It might work out that the latter can happen without changing library budgets, but it is a fundamentally different arrangement, and I think it would quickly sink in with taxpayers. Our society has a lot of adapting and elbowing to do about digital content. Publishers fighting with Amazon is one example of what will have to happen hundreds and thousands of times.

More hardbacks

Amazon claims to have sold more ebooks than hardbacks. That is a vastly different (and lesser) claim!

Sorry if I find that mistake in a post I otherwise basically agree with to be highly ironic.


I thought one thing and wrote another. I should amend it to be regarding hardcover books.

Thanks for pointing that out!

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