If you have ever read a book on an electronic device, you will surely have wondered how books will look in the future.
Kevin Kelly wrote an interesting blog article, that takes a look into the future of books.
Here some quotes from the article:
The current custodians of ebooks -- Amazon, Google and the publishers -- have agreed to cripple the liquidity of ebooks by preventing readers from cut-and-pasting text easily, or to copy large sections of a book, or to otherwise seriously manipulate the text. But eventually the text of ebooks will be liberated, and the true nature of books will blossom. We will find out that books never really wanted to be telephone directories, or hardware catalogs, or gargantuan lists. These are jobs that websites are much superior at -- all that updating and searching -- tasks that paper is not suited for. What books have always wanted was to be annotated, marked up, underlined, dog-eared, summarized, cross-referenced, hyperlinked, shared, and talked-to. Being digital allows them to do all that and more.
Indeed dense hyperlinking among books would make every book a networked event.
In the long run (next 10-20 years) we won't pay for individual books any more than we'll pay for individual songs or movies. All will be streamed in paid subscription services; you'll just "borrow" what you want. That defuses the current anxiety to produce a container for ebooks that can be owned. Ebooks won't be owned. They'll be accessed.
Read his full blog post here:
What Books Will Become by Kevin Kelly
