Comments on: Publishers and the Future of Reading

By: Bing and Wave: New Technologies with Different Aims « The Scholarly Kitchen

Bing and Wave: New Technologies with Different Aims « The Scholarly Kitchen — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 10:57:49 +0000

[...] do for print and slightly extending it. We need to think bigger, to find new paradigms, and as Kent put it last week, to think more about the future of reading, rather than the future of books. [...]

By: Jill ONeill

Jill ONeill — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:42:39 +0000

I would suggest that it isn’t a question of Wikert’s “evolving beyond books” or Anderson’s “releasing of content”. Now that there are a variety of vehicles or vessels from which one can take content, the key is to determine which option works best for which community and/or discipline. It’s not a one-size fits all. The book isn’t dead and blogs haven’t necessarily replaced anything. In some instances, for some types of discussions, it might be that a blog is a better idea for the business community than a overly-padded print volume. For some purposes, as in history, I will want a full-length monograph.

Half of the problem in the publishing industry currently (IMHO) is that everyone is speaking as if it must be an all-or-nothing game. The situation is much more difficult and much more exciting than that. Each society, each discipline, each community will have to figure out what works best for any given task or professional workflow. That’s publisher creativity and subsequent value-add may emerge.

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:18:42 +0000

I read the Thompson article yesterday, in print no less! I think there are some good ideas in there, but they're mixed in with a lot of impractical wishful thinking. One can spend a huge amount of money building an online environment around a book or a journal, but that does not mean a community will be created. Our particular audience, research scientists, seem particularly uninterested in chatting online with one another about books or journal articles, despite vast sums being spent to build things like the Nature Network. I do think it's valuable to explore new ways of bringing information to the public, but it's also quite possibly a way to invest a lot of cash with little return. Thompson bases the whole thing on the idea that a few sci-fi authors are selling more books because they're taking advantage of the novelty of having some free material online. As I wrote last week, this is a short-term, limited phenomenon. If everything is free, then the novelty wears off and it no longer gets the extra attention. Wikert's column was right on the money though. I've stopped buying books about the internet, about the future of publishing and about social media because every one that I've purchased turns out to be a couple of blog entries stretched out to 250 pages. You read the first 25 pages or so and you know everything the book is going to tell you.