“The web revolution that is turning whole industries from music to television upside down has been slow to reach the cosy world of books – apart, that is, from the pioneering bookseller Amazon.”
This is how Victor Keegan begins his article for the Guardian “A New Chapter for Books on the Web”
Really? Slow to reach the world of books? I am not sure where Mr. Keegan has been or what forces are behind the publication of this article but I think he has it all backwards.
The book industry has been at the bleeding edge of the cataclysmic changes of technology and industry. Then came the music industry and only recently the television industry.
Before Amazon rewrote the rules of new bookselling there was a little company called Interloc that turned the used and out of print book world on its head. Founded by Dick Weatherford, who later went on and founded Alibris, Interloc provided booksellers with a software program that would match their inventory to the “wants” of other booksellers. It essentially put an end to AB Bookmans’ Weekly, a print publication, which for decades served the book trade as the primary source for this need.
Keegan goes on to say “Anyone who thought that the web was going to kill books has to explain the fact that at the very least there are now millions more waiting to be killed off.” Here he is confusing the book as physical object with the book has a digital object. Access to material via the digital format has never been greater and should continue to grow at an astounding pace for years to come. The only obstacle to this being the jaws of copyright law. The issue that still remains is to what extent these new digital options will “kill books” as a physical object
Some of the technologies on the book table these days that the article touches on are:
ebooks
social networking
print on demand
Google Book search
project gutenberg
digitization
What a great time to be a book.