Perspectives & Strategy

The other day I read an article “Will e-Books Replace Real Books?”. I feel that I have heard this view a few times before and I find myself tangled up by this.

I have always valued books, they have always been a part of my life, and I think I will continue to value books well into the future. The irony is of-course is that I am an e-writer and publish weekly on the Internet. E-writing will of-course be a great part of our future. I do of-course hope that my writing stands the test of time, but the truth is that on-line writing is on the whole of a very low quality. That is one of the things that marks out real books from the wealth of works on this media; quality.

In my youth I remember spending hours in my mother’s favourite store – the book store. I also remember spending many hours leafing through the volumes on my grandfather’s shelves, particularly looking in awe at the older volumes, some dating back to 1770 and earlier. The older works always fascinated me, and today I do own a few reasonable volumes, but not as many as I would really like.

Even though the quality of writing in books published today is much lower than it was say 30 years ago. On the whole though works where an editor and publisher are involved do tend to be of a much higher quality than the vast majority of what is said on the web is full of grammatical and spelling errors, and the chances are I will commit the cardinal sin before the end of this article – but then I do not have an editor or publisher to inspect all that I write, I have to do all that myself.

When asked the question whether people would prefer to buy paper books to e-books? I have to say that I prefer paper to electronic books at any time. Something like Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader does not excite me. The functionality may have improved tremendously but my objection is not about the quality of the readers, which will always continue to improve over time. I prefer the feel of a real book in my hands. That said I do read plenty of electronic documents without ever printing them onto paper. I think there are differences between the media that will be ever present.

In-case you are thinking about being ecologically sound. Our paper needs are taken care of from a mixture of farmed and re-cycled paper. Paper is ecologically sound and will continue to be provided we use it conservatively.

Obviously electronic works can be searched through more easily, but with so much information out there will the important nugget be found? This is where the search engines fail up miserably. Newspapers and magazines were supposed to have been at the forefront of electronic information distribution providing us with exactly the news we were interested in, but sadly that have failed to deliver on this vision and seem to be facing a long, torturous, death. Maybe their role was usurped by the great search engines in the clouds, despite their imprecision.

The future of knowledge and how we deliver it is sure to be an exciting one. I am ready for the journey.