Are printed books going the way of the typewriter? Probably not, but the market will definitely be smaller.
Amazon has announced that customers are downloading Kindle books more than hardcovers and paperbacks combined. Since April 1, Amazon has sold 105 Kindle books for every 100 print books purchased.
The big question is whether this is the end of the paper back? Not really, says commentator Nicholas Carr. E-books, he says, are too rigid and paper books are just more flexible.
"Because we've come to take printed books for granted, we tend to overlook their enormous flexibility as reading instruments,'' Carr writes. "It's easy to flip through the pages of a physical book, forward and backward. It's easy to jump quickly between widely separated sections, marking your place with your thumb or a stray bit of paper or even a hair plucked from your head (yes, I believe I've done that). You can write anywhere and in any form on any page of a book, using pen or pencil or highlighter or the tip of a burnt match (ditto). You can dog-ear pages or fold them in half or rip them out. You can keep many different books open simultaneously, dipping in and out of them to gather related information. And when you just want to read, the tranquility of a printed book provides a natural shield against distraction. Despite being low-tech – or maybe because of it – printed books and other paper documents support all sorts of reading techniques, they make it easy to shift seamlessly between those techniques, and they're amenable to personal idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. E-books are much more rigid. Refreshing discrete pages of text on a fixed screen is a far different, and far less flexible, process than flipping through pliant pages of fixed text. By necessity, a screen-based, software-powered reading device imposes navigational protocols and routines on the user, allowing certain patterns of use but preventing or hindering others."
Carr has a point but it's hard to see kids starting school today, 5 year olds, appreciating print books in the same way and going on to develop reference systems around them.
Still, print books are unlikely to disappear completely. As Carr points out, they are more flexible to use than an e-reader. Just as people still buy CDs and even vinyls – why even the cassette is coming back – people will continue to buy books. There will just be fewer of them.
no comment untill now