{"id":56,"date":"2005-01-22T12:04:24","date_gmt":"2005-01-22T12:04:24","guid":{"rendered":"\/ifbookblog\/?p=56"},"modified":"2005-01-22T12:04:24","modified_gmt":"2005-01-22T12:04:24","slug":"the_book_is_doomed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/2005\/01\/22\/the_book_is_doomed\/","title":{"rendered":"the book is doomed"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"creme “The book is doomed.” That was Steven Pemberton<\/a>‘s definitive answer to my musings about the future of the book in the digital age. It was the end of the first day of an international conference on web design, we were at the Friday night conference dinner, eating a crè\tme brulee that had been set ablaze just minutes before, and I don’t mean the little blue acetylene flame that puffs out after a few seconds. The chef blasted our crè\tme brulee for several minutes with a torch that looked like something a forest ranger would use to execute a controlled burn.
\nSo, I’m eating my crè\tme brulee, trying to understand this pronouncement; when someone like Steven Pemberton says that the book, in the digital age, is doomed, you have to take it seriously. He cites The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen<\/a>. The thesis, Pemberton explains, has to do with the process of innovation and adoption. A new invention has to find a niche market that will allow it to improve and develop. Once the new invention advances enough to allow it to compete with the entrenched technology it is quickly adopted. This often radically changes an industry. Pemberton gives computer printers as an example. Anyone remember the old dot matrix printers<\/a>? They had gears on the side that fit into corresponding holes in the paper. Remember how slow they were and how poor the quality was? The introduction of the laser printer<\/a> made vast improvements in printer quality and as soon as printer technology improved, a revolution in desktop publishing was made possible.
\nThe book, Pemberton contends, will experience a similar sea-change the moment screen technology improves enough to compete with the printed page.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The book is doomed.” That was Steven Pemberton‘s definitive answer to my musings about the future of the book in the digital age. It was the end of the first day of an international conference on web design, we were at the Friday night conference dinner, eating a crè me brulee that had been set […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[374,1849],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences_and_excursions","category-the-ideal-device"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}