The Economist rocks : Now that books are being digitised, how will people read?
The biggest
changes are likely to be seen in what becomes a book in the first
place. Here the internet may indeed be to some book genres what Apple
has been to music—
IN SECRET
locations and using secret methods, human beings are scanning lots and
lots of books for Google, the world’s largest web-search company. That
humans are involved is beyond doubt (fingers are visible in the corners
of many pages on books.google.com) although this is uncharacteristic of Google, which has a fetish for purist technology. [..] So a
conservative estimate has Google digitising at least 10m books a year.
The total number of titles in existence is estimated to be about 65m.[...]So books that
people would not traditionally read in their entirety, or that require
frequent updating, are likely to migrate online and perhaps to cease
being books at all. Telephone directories and dictionaries, and
probably cookbooks and textbooks, will all fall into this category.[...]Non-fiction
books will also benefit from another change that comes with
digitisation. Like web pages, digitised books can have incoming and
outgoing hyperlinks. [...]What about short stories and poems? Being short, they fit the new media, so some may do
well online and need not be bound in paper. Commuters could receive their daily haiku or sonnet on their mobile phones while taking the bus to work. They might also use the new media to enjoy poetry in a
more traditional way. “Storytelling started as oral history,” says Adam Smith, the boss of Google’s book project, so a partial reversion to that form, through podcasting, would be natural.
We definitely need something to keep "tracks".
