The race is on. Amazon, Google, Apple, Sony and a host of other companies are moving at breakneck speed to create the e-book atmosphere that will become your e-book universe of choice.
In his insightful piece at the Huffington Post, Eebs: A History of Future Publishing, Giles Slade gives us a good look at the current battlefield.
“In the emerging world of e-Books, Kindle-Amazon will increasingly occupy a position similar to the iPod while Google (a collector and purveyor of e-Books) together with its partner Sony (a manufacturer of e-Readers) will forever be positioned at the lower end of the e-Book market along with several other manufacturers” says Slade.
But the future, says Slade “is not the dominance of any one format, device or publisher, but a qualitative change in the actual use of the technology.”
We have to grow into the technology and maximize its usefulness not parse it out to various companies so they may build their own selfish versions. These new technologies demand new types of “books,” not simply digitized versions of existing ones.
No matter how many different e-readers hit the market, each with their bundles of features, they will never replace the book they will only, at best, complement it. As Slade so aptly puts it “no Swiss Army Knife will never replace a good corkscrew, a good screwdriver or a good pair of scissors.”
In a piece I wrote in April of 2007, The E-Book Takes Another Hit. Time For a Name Change?, I argued that “E-book is an inherently flawed term. An oxymoron. You can offer the text of a book electronically but you can never offer a book this way. A book is more than text, it is a sum of its parts. Call it an ECM – The Electronic Content Machine – or a PTM- a Portable Text Machine – It is time to lose the e-book name.”
Slade says we should ‘simply call them ‘eebs.’
Also of note, the “hit” I referred to in the title was in response to an article at Computerworld that included the e-book on its list of “The 21 Biggest Technology Flops” of all time!