TOC Recommended Reading

Mac Slocum
September 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Digital Newspapers and Digital History (Adam Hodgkin, Exact Editions)

A Kindle for books, a Plastic Logic napkin for newspapers, and no doubt an iMag reader of some kind for magazines. That way lies madness. Google have a better plan [to] try to deliver everything through a web browser. That should work in the direction of universal access. I hope Plastic Logic realise that their device needs to run a standard web browser before they commit everything to a Kindle-like proprietary device.

I Am Trying To Believe (that Rock Stars aren't Dead) (Jim Stogdill, O'Reilly Radar)

... "sell records" was not some complex business model come down from on high. I can't help but think that if there was an equally effective replacement someone would have thought of it by now. That's not to say I don't think new and better music distribution and monetization models won't be invented, I just don't think they will capture and concentrate as much value as the one that is dying before our eyes did. I suspect the balance between linear (touring) and leverage (selling stuff while you sit at home) has simply and irrevocably shifted toward the linear.

A unified field theory of publishing in the networked era (Bob Stein, if:book)

Reading and writing have always been social activities, but that fact tends to be obscured by the medium of print. We grew up with images of the solitary reader curled up in a chair or under a tree and the writer alone in his garret. The most important thing my colleagues and I have learned during our experiments with networked books over the past few years is that as discourse moves off the page onto the network, the social aspects are revealed in sometimes startling clarity. These exchanges move from background to foreground, a transition that has dramatic implications.

Related:

• TOC News
• TOC Analysis and Opinion