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The future of the book in the digital age

By Bill Cope

(2)

| Others | 9781843342403

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Book Description

Summary: With contributions from some of the world's leading authorities, this publication considers the future of the book in the digital age.

1 Review

This book started well and I found it was interesting, unfortunately bits of the last couple articles made me very angry and it kind of coloured my perception of the whole thing. The book is a collection of different essays by publishers, librarians and others. I enjoyed the first few essays which l ... (continue)

This book started well and I found it was interesting, unfortunately bits of the last couple articles made me very angry and it kind of coloured my perception of the whole thing. The book is a collection of different essays by publishers, librarians and others. I enjoyed the first few essays which looked at how the internet, and digital publishing, is changing the face of printing and publishing. How now books with a smaller audience can be printed and published at reasonable cost. There were essays that looked at the effect of internet bookshops on physical bookshops, the price of first editions, and the variety of books available for print. For someone who has an obscure academic interest and has to buy all the books in my research area online, the fact that people were even questioning that the internet provided a greater variety of books surprised me.
There were articles about whether or not people were reading less or more. Interestingly one of the articles mentioned how people who spent more time online spent less time watching television.
The articles written by librarians were a bit more disappointing; one was just a history of libraries in the United States. The other contained the “fact” that the first printed book ever was made in 1450 by Gutenberg. Nothing pisses me off more than the ignorance of Europeans on this matter. I have been to the British Library and seen a Dated Printed Book that’s over 500 years OLDER than this! What especially bothered me about this was in the introduction the author’s credited China with early printing, why they let this statement stand I don’t understand. Part of me now wants to write my dissertation on the effects of printing in China and get it published in the library and history journal, just to stop idiots writing things like this. To make it worse the rest of the article was about globalisation, and how printing when invented by Europeans then took “the world” by storm! Now with the invention of the internet something that would have only a small audience, (a modern Chinese poem!) would be able to be distributed online. Some people’s cultural ignorance is really astounding.
Overall I did enjoy the book, the last few essays nonwithstanding, it did have some good points. Ironically in a book that was all about how niche market books can be made available cheaply, this was a soft cover book that goes for £37 on Amazon!!! I’m glad I was able to borrow it from the library at work.

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Robot-mel said on Feb 1, 2010 | Add your feedback