Entries tagged with “bookstores” from Tools of Change for Publishing
TOC Recommended Reading
Mac Slocum
October 16, 2008
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In Defense of Piracy (Lawrence Lessig, Wall Street Journal)
The return of this "remix" culture could drive extraordinary economic growth, if encouraged, and properly balanced. It could return our culture to a practice that has marked every culture in human history -- save a few in the developed world for much of the 20th century -- where many create as well as consume. And it could inspire a deeper, much more meaningful practice of learning for a generation that has no time to read a book, but spends scores of hours each week listening, or watching or creating, "media."
Where is everybody? (Joe Wikert, TeleRead)
"If you build it, they will come" only works in the movies. If they really want to succeed Borders needs to do something beyond just making all this technology available in the store. Where are the in-store events (e.g., come let us help you research your family name, come see the latest e-book technologies, etc.)? How about signage in other areas of the store that promotes the tech kiosk area?
Mass book digitization: The deeper story of Google Books and the Open Content Alliance (Kalev Leetaru, First Monday)
Both projects offer the ability to search within a particular work, but only Google offers the ability to search across its entire collection. A search across the OCA archive only searches titles and description fields, not the full text of works. The OCA system thus offers a document-centric model, while Google offers both document and collection-based models, allowing broad exploratory searches of its entire holdings: the equivalent of being able to "full text search" a library. The importance of this difference cannot be understated in the limitations it places on the ability of patrons to interact with the OCA collections.
College Bookstores to Offer Ebooks through Kiosks
Mac Slocum
September 26, 2008
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Seven college bookstores will soon offer movies and ebooks through in-store kiosks. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Movies will be the first product offered at the kiosks, which are scheduled to appear at seven stores next month. The plan is to add digital textbooks to the kiosks starting next summer, says Charles Schmidt, a spokesman for the association.
A kiosk-based system targeted at college students will struggle to compete against digital options like iTunes and P2P networks, but Ars Technica says movies are the first step in a broader initiative:
... it's part of a plan to get electronic distribution channels up and running in advance of the availability of digital textbook material. If all goes well, the first digital textbooks and supplementary class material will appear there starting next summer. Left unsaid, however, was whether this material would be protected by DRM; it's a safe bet that it will.
Reinventing the Book and Killing It are Separate Things
Mac Slocum
August 11, 2008
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Richard Cohen has a bone to pick with Amazon, the Kindle, digital books, and anyone who threatens the welfare of bookstores, children and unknown literature. From Cohen's Washington Post column:
... over at Amazon they are inadvertently thinking of ways to make the world worse for children and for the grown-ups who love them to pieces. What Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon's founder, wants more than anything is to do away with the book as we know it. "Jeff once said that he couldn't imagine anything more important than reinventing the book," said Steven Kessel, one of Bezos's top guys. Kessel is in charge of digitizing everything in sight.
Nothing more important than reinventing the book? Not ending world hunger? Not taking Rush Limbaugh off the air? None of these? What's wrong with the book? I understand that it's bulky and expensive to ship and that it entails the consumption of paper, which is probably not green, but then what is? The book has been around for a very long time (Google the exact number of years, please), and I love it so.
Cohen's column adheres to the "book lover overreaction" we've discussed previously. Market forces and changing consumer tastes may indeed signal the end of traditional bookstores, and that's something to lament and fight against. But this idea that digital books have been set loose by entrepreneurial masterminds -- diabolical sorts intent on destroying the print universe -- is overwrought. "Reinventing" the book is not synonymous with "killing the print book." Digital books are nothing more than alternative delivery mechanisms for content. Their intent (if ebooks can have intent) is to expand choice, not eradicate the printed volume.
I can't tell if Cohen is saying goodbye to print books or bookstores or some combination of the two. His column is clearly a cathartic exercise, not a market analysis, but the association he seems to make between a downturn in bookstores and the rise of digital books is incorrect. Bookstores are in decline partly because consumers are purchasing their core product -- print books -- through online retailers like Amazon. Ebooks may eventually achieve widespread adoption and, by extension, lead to the shuttering of traditional bookstores, but that's not currently the case.
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