Industry | 2010.02.06
Palms, Kindles, Nooks, iPads – none are as cool as Gutenberg's gadget | Simon Jenkins
For 20 years I have been trying e-books and e-newspapers – but print on paper has outlasted every obituarist
Ohmygod the book is dead – yet again. Another assassin, the iPad , wings its way across the Atlantic, sowing shock and awe and bringing angels of death to mainstream everything. Those still smearing black gunge on dead trees are portrayed as Hare Krishna nutters, banging the drum for the old religion. They are so completely yesterday. Whataboy, Jobs. Buy Apple. Gimme another freebie.
New computers are sold with the same hype that used to attend each year\'s new cars. Instead of half-naked women, we get an audience of screaming Apple-heads. Instead of Jeremy Clarkson in ecstasy on a Mediterranean hairpin, we get the gasping techno-reporter, " one of a small group of people to be given a sneak hands-on preview " (the Guardian), declaring that " other e-companies had better look out " (the Times). Apple\'s chief Steve Jobs is depicted by his publicists as the iconic nerd, staged in designer stubble and moving through the throng like a black-shirted extra from The Matrix. " It\'s so cool, I don\'t care ," incants an anonymous tweeter, probably some computer-disseminated advertising copy.
Back in 1996 the business guru Peter Drucker asserted in Wired magazine that the internet would make money for Microsoft and Intel, while everyone else would lose a fortune. Money would go to those who grabbed early monopolies, but overall "the industry won\'t make a dime". Most participants will survive on venture capital until, sooner or later, the bubble bursts and the market flattens. People expect anything onscreen to be free – but the world cannot eat free.
For the most part, Drucker was right. The breakneck advance of hand-held internet devices is impressive, but the money lies mostly in selling plastic. The myriad internet millionaires of the 1990s have vanished. Venture capitalists came and went, badly bloodied. Outriders such as Amazon, Facebook and Twitter capture attention and glitz, as did lastminute and others in the early days, but you can scan coverage of these companies and find not a mention of profit. The internet remains enveloped in left-wing theorising about free-to-air, as if an entire industry could defy the tenets of market capitalism.
Most internet-based companies survive on inducing indulgent bankers or governments to spend someone else\'s money on ventures few of which will make money. They fondly hope that one day the much abused advertising industry will come to their rescue. Online charging is still in its infancy. Put another way, internet start-ups are like Manchester City. As long as the sugar daddy is ready to lose his shirt, the party keeps rolling.
The same investor scepticism as is now shown towards Detroit cars and supersonic jets should be directed at anything beginning with "i" or "e". The dotcom bubble diverted billions of pounds from more productive investment. It drained pension funds of cash and hired and fired thousands of young graduates, the few survivors now mostly concentrating on gambling. The craze for inappropriate e-government has taxed the British public sector an estimated £26bn. Trollope\'s The Way We Live Now is alive and well and living in Whitehall as well as California.
I regard the laptop and the mobile phone as boons and welcome novelty. Some innovations will win and some lose. My bible in these matters – The Shock of the Old, by David Egerton of Imperial College – is a catalogue of product failure and a sound corrective to techno-dazzle, but it does not undermine the importance of innovation. The fact that Concorde, drip-dry shirts and food pills proved commercial blind alleys does not invalidate the virtues of the world wide web.
Likewise I have been trying e-books – as I have e-newspapers – for 20 years and have no doubt that they will find some niche in the marketplace. But print on paper has outlasted every obituarist. Nothing – from the advent of radio and television to the rise of the paperback, the collapse of price maintenance, the "demise" of the local bookshop and now electronic publishing – has dented its appeal.
The press is supposedly cast in gloom, largely through the waning of the boost of investment and pagination that followed the Wapping and computing revolutions of the 1980s. But British quality papers sold just 1.4m copies a day in 1947, before the television boom. This rose to peak at 2.7m in 1985, was 2.6m in 2001, and even today is only down to 2.1m. This is a long way from death.
The overwhelming bulk of newspaper revenue still comes from people who want to buy and/or advertise in the printed product. No advertising, including on television and the internet, is doing well at present. There will be changes to product and price. But to forecast the demise of something so clearly wanted as writing printed on paper is absurd.
The assumption involved in the e-book is that Milton\'s "precious lifeblood of a master spirit" is merely a bundle of words, best delivered to the reader as swiftly and efficiently as possible. The internet salesman may scream that "the web will give every housewife the Library of Congress on her kitchen table"; but, as one wit replied, she wants a recipe that does not fail when doused in flour or gravy. She still wants a Model-T, not a Rolls-Royce.
Geoffrey Nunberg \'s cult study of the book, published in 1996, asserted as fact that "bound, printed volumes … will likely disappear soon". Since then, bound, printed volume production has soared to record levels. In 2009, when most industries went to rock bottom, the number of titles published in the UK reached a new record of 133,000 (against just 14,000 in the "golden" interwar years). Volume was also a record 5.8m copies. When American e-titles began to boom after 2000, the number of printed titles rose rather than fell.
Part of this must be attributable to book sales being overwhelmingly for gifts, with 60%-70% of most publishers\' output being sold in the two months before Christmas. I see no harm in this. For reasons that are aesthetic as much as practical, books are popular presents. That helps explain the robustness of the hardback and picture book, widely regarded as doomed in the 1960s.
I watched the advent of the electronic "flat tablet" three decades ago (at the Knight-Ridder media lab in Colorado). It failed. It has been followed by hopefuls galore, down to today\'s Palms, Kindles, Nooks and iPads. Each electronic innovation appears to have enhanced the appeal of print on paper rather than replaced it, much as internet reproduction has increased the appeal of live performance.
Gutenberg has yet to be bettered. A book is an indestructible, self-sufficient product, its character reflecting the genius of one creative mind. As long as words are written and people can read, settling down with a book remains an intimate sharing of sensibility. It delights the eye, as a shelf of books furnishes a room. It offers escape from the ubiquitous screen.
I am amused that each development of the e-book renders its pages more like print on paper. Its LED gets more like daylight, its page-turning more finger-friendly, its packaging more appealing. I am sure a Californian boffin will one day invent an e-book that needs no electricity and has floppy pages you can dog-ear. He might even call it a book.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ndle-ipad-gutenberg-book-print
Instagram is adding automatic in-app text translation - The Verge views: 1530
Here’s a ‘Brand-New’ Massive Multilingual Dataset for Machine Translation views: 1529