They Don’t Love You Like I Love You: books get defensive
A bookstore named Booksplus has taken out some ads showing a book giving a computer error message, along with the tagline “Books never let you down.” The point of course is that digital books have all kinds of potential technological pitfalls that good ‘ol printed books don’t have. Booksplus of course has a point, but their viewpoint is also a bit defensive and completely small-minded. Like, with that kind of mentality we’d all still be living in caves. It’s like saying, “Horses don’t break down by the side of the road, so let’s not invent cars.” And of course, what’s really interesting about these ads in the “print is dead” debate, is that it shows that the book industry is finally realizing that electronic reading is here and is a serious threat to the long-held status quo. When they start telling how good you have it right now, they know you’re looking over your shoulder at what’s coming next.
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Agree with your comments.
Furthermore, in the digital download future, when the very first sentence of Eamonn Duffy’s “Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes” (Yale University Press) says there are more than 90 million Catholics in the world, when he meant more than 900 million (and now there are about 1.1 billion), Yale (and the author, and readers) won’t have to wait several months for the first printing to sell through so corrections can be made on the reprint.
Likewise, the binding faults which occurred through a high proportion of the Australian first printing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - causing frustration, expense, lost sales and significant environmental cost - will be a thing of the past.
What is this addiction to ink on dead trees all about?