Tagged: amazon

Books, iPads and chickens

@obionyeaso recently asked me for a view on this by David Gelles and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in the FT – essentially will the iPad / Kindle shatter the book publishing business in the way the iPod and iTunes shattered the music business.

My short answer would be no – it won’t.  The short reason for this is that the form of content that is a book is very well adapted to the form of distribution that is printed and bound bits of paper.  This is unlike news, which is not necessarily well adapted to the form of distribution that is newspaper, or the music track which we have discovered is very poorly adapted to the form of distribution that is an album or CD.  At the same time a book is an important cultural feature in the way that a CD, album or even a newspaper is not. Continue reading

Book burying – the new book burning?

Whatever your take on the recent #amazonfail controversy – it does suggest, as this article implies in its concluding paragraph that book burying (or in fact any form of content supression) could be the new book burning. Given that tagging in it various forms is becoming the principal method of information retrieval, this episode shows the importance of being alive to ways in which this process can be manipulated – wittingly or otherwise. Continue reading