eBooks in the WSJ

The folks at the Wall Street Journal very nicely asked me to write a cover story for their Journal Report on technology, which is on the stands today. The piece is here online, but if you get a chance, check in out in print (ironic, I know.) They dedicated the whole front page of the section to the story, which is really cool to see. (It's also teased above the masthead on the front page.) There are about a dozen different predictions running through the piece, some of the positive, some negative. It will be interesting to see which ones get picked up, and whether people read it as an optimistic piece, or more mixed:

Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked. The unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google's attention.

In this world, citation will become as powerful a sales engine as promotion is today. An author will write an arresting description of Thomas Edison's controversial invention of the light bulb, and thanks to hundreds of inbound links from bookloggers quoting the passage, those pages will rise to the top of Google's results for anyone searching "invention of light bulb." Each day, Google will deposit a hundred potential book buyers on that page, eager for information about Edison's breakthrough. Those hundred readers might pale compared with the tens of thousands of prospective buyers an author gets from an NPR appearance, but that Google ranking doesn't fade away overnight. It becomes a kind of permanent annuity for the author.

 Also, if you didn't get to read it, be sure to check out Kevin Kelly's excellent piece on digital books from the Times Magazine last year, which I quote in the Journal essay. We focus on some different angles, but like much of what Kevin and I write, the two pieces are complementary.

Comments

[Jemaleddin]

You know, the WSJ can put "online" in its URLS, but the fact that this article has exactly two links - to information on the stocks prices of Google and Amazon - is telling. It has a dreadful URL - and a link tag pointing to it with rel instead of rev = canonical in the source - that only a URL-shortening service could love.

You've written a great piece that demonstrates how fundamentally you understand the web and left it in the hands of people who don't. Sad, that.

[Perianne]

Great piece. Read it first in my own paid print copy of the WSJ (print beat twitter this morning). You cite two reasons for the shift. There may be a third, overall reason; consumer control of content. Case in point: TV DVR penetration has risen to 30% of US HH's and in "upscale" homes is +60%. Consumers are so used to controlling, managing and time shifting their own content that the K2 feeds those needs perfectly and removes the barrier of location to book/mag/newsp/blog access.

[Amanda Seyderhelm]

Your article is the first really insightful review on ebooks I have read! And thanks for the link to Kevin's piece. I saw it as an optimistic piece - there are tremendous opportunities now for writers to mix content with commercialism, and challenges with 'attention' for readers. Any idea how Kindle performs on the beach - all that sand?!

[Bill Schaffer]

An extremely well-written and interesting article.
Is there any concern about technological changes in media, such that the e-book readers of today will have to upgrade h/w from time to time? I have in mind the disappearance of card readers, paper tape, magnetic tape (some uses), floppies of all sizes, and now CDs and DVDs.Would Amazon "replace" (guarantee accessibility to)my e-copy of Brothers Karamazov if, twenty years from now, or 500 years from now, compatibility is totally broken?
I was at an exhibit years ago, and the Book of Kells was on display. Made in the year 800, it is readable today (providing one knows Latin)....

Bill

[Free Cards]

Technology is going so fast. Now its not ebooks, its about microblogging and nanoblogging

[Rob]

The more that these developments unfold, the more I recall the transformations of reading and publishing that took place during the Victorian period (which you allude to here). It's as if the era of penny dreadfuls and shilling shockers is poised for a digital comeback.

Maybe Richard Altick's "English Common Reader" could help us make sense of these changes. In any case, it's certainly hard not to think about Dickens in this context.

[Vladimir]

What do you think about interactivity in usual printed editions?
http://linkod.com/en.html

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Would you please provide a URL for this quote so I can send it to friends, or at least WSJ publication date, article title
"If you like to see the strong slap around the weak -- and deep down, you know you do -- this was the sports weekend for you." - WSJ

[Dan Gabriels]

Sorry if this is dated intelligence, but I just read your discussion of DevonThink. There was/is a tool well beyond this, which began as software that had a desktop manifestation, the free Kenjin, but went Corporate server-based and mega-costly. Check www.autonomy.com. This software uses Bayes Theorem and some other wonders to "understand" text, and I gather at this point video and audio. Not only does this pemit searching by meaning, but autonomy has some added functionalities for creating visual maps of how the bulk of information you've given it to analyze relates, part-to-part. MY Dream was to employ this to understand the 8000 pages of my own text in such a way as to facilitate a linear presentation of the core of it--i.e., a book. But the individual-user form did not continue in development. This felt to me a bit like keeping the Printing Press for Corporations only.

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