Catching a cold
by Tom Bentley
Trying to track down a copy of Seth Godin's Unleashing the Ideavirus at short notice, I spent an unhappy half hour talking to Waterstone's braches all over London looking for a copy I could pick up on the way home (result: they have five copies in Brussels) , before realising that an author preaching the virtues of uncontrolled lateral communication might well practice what he preaches. Amazon.com trails the paperback version of the book as 'the most downloaded e-book in history', and sure enough, the whole thing is available at www.ideavirus.com. The bound version also claims to have been a top five Amazon bestseller, so his free distribution doesn't seem to have hurt the bottom line a bit (luckily for his thesis).
Perhaps this is the same kind of principle that allows one to pick up a copy of Adbusters in WHSmith in Swansea?
I recently had a similar experience when I discovered that the book I had just bought on learning object repositories (oh yes) was actually a best seller in its field, despite being freely available on the web.
But is this just because the generation of people demanding hard copies are conditioned to read books, not screens. Will a next generation of readers be less ready to fork out for the tangible?
Tony Quinlan
Possibly, but I doubt it for two reasons:
Firstly the pure inconvenience of reading only small portions of something at a time. Reading on a PDA is like reading a book that only gives you 100 words per page. It quickly becomes a real pain to turn the page before you've reached the end of a concept.
And on the monitor I don't think it's that different - I don't think that current thinking on writing more simply and concisely for the web is purely for this generation.
Secondly, I remember a conversation I had a few years ago with IBM's head of R&D for monitors and terminals. He commented at the time that we don't really know whether what we've (he'd) been working on was in any way appropriate to the human animal and its physiology.
After a few centuries of work, on the other hand, I think that paper and books are still effective. The question may be whether the new paper-like displays and liquid inks change this equation by making e-text available in a hardcopy-like format?
Helen Helen
There's also the social and cultural associations around buying and reading books. They may be simple objects created from paper, cardboard and gum, but they are an important physical presence in our homes and workplaces - in many cases they can be status symbols. Who hasn't filled their bookshelves with worthy titles that they've only ever skimmed through?
The community aspect is interesting too - see for example the explosion of bookshop cafes in the US that has proved equally popular in the UK and has made the bookshop as much a meeting place as somewhere to pick up the latest Marian Keynes.
And finally what about the bookcrossing phenomenon that hit Manchester earlier this month? (see www.urbis.org.uk)
That would become impossible in the age of e-books...
Tony Quinlan
I think the Book Crossing concept is a fascinating one - something that embodies altruism and a sense of almost anonymous community (when practised by individuals rather than organisations) yet does so through a medium that is essentially solitary. (Except for over-the-shoulder readers on the bus)
Tony Quinlan
I think his combination of e-text and hardcopy works well. I remember getting the e-version, reading bits of it on my Palm, beaming it to others I thought would be interested. But the crunch was that I read enough to get me interested, but in a format (small screen) that meant I wasn't going to read the whole thing there - and I needed the hardcopy.
It's a format I'm planning on using in similar ways for a variety of other publishing projects I've got under way: novels, business fiction and business text on using narrative. Free access to full text, but in a format that's not conducive to reading the full thing...