The Ink running dry

Wednesday, 30 September, 2009 @ 10:05PM

It already was a way to squeeze things down, and books have been further reduced to e-books. In the 15th century, Johannes gutenberg, invented a movable type of printer, which brought about a revolution in the way books used to be perceived. They could now be copied faster and at cheaper rates. With the advent of the computer age, the winds of change blew again, drying away the letters of the parchment and inking them on a virtual system. It could now be easily stored and shared across the globe. But do we see another revolution on its way?

The word e-book was not used until quite recently. It came from a guy who thought, that computers, carried more of storage and safe retrieval value than they did actual computing. Michael Hart called it E-text, and typed in the first e-book- The American Declaration of Independence. It took about 3 decades for the internet to seep into each and every household like village mice and it was then that the corporate world reawakened Hart's legacy. Many companies invested a lot of money into it, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, Project Gutenberg to name a few. E-books became part of the big picture and what initially began as .pdf documents grew into multiple formats. From then, till now, things have taken a slightly different path. There has been recent interest in a particular device called as the e-book reader. Amazon has it’s own, the Amazon Kindle. Many other companies like Sony and Microsoft, have also started manufacturing e-book readers, creating as close a resemblance to the traditional books as possible. There are many websites, the premiere being ebooks.com, which have a system of membership and online purchase of ebooks, ranging from archives to latest releases. Audio-books are also often added along, a sound-clip where the author himself in most cases, reads out his book. So, in a way, E-books in their entirety have been converted into a whole new world. But with so much happening around, there still is a missing piece in the jigsaw. It's not as popular as it seems.

The year 2004 ended with $23.72 billion in net sales, the United States Publishing Industry claimed. But the figures on similar lines for e-books were not so similar. It was a midget 12 - 15 million. One of the key reasons behind this is the cost mismatch, which in turn owes itself to the unrelenting seas of pirate-infested waters. Privacy is one thing, e-books are yet to settle a score with. But that notwithstanding, Why would anyone go for an e-book, when you can have a published hard-back splashy version for just about the same price. Though there are free e-book libraries, existing only for promotion reasons, they happen to be, for the most part, outdated. Then there's also a general mood of preferring the old paper and ink over the young cursor and link.

If this innovation is to work out, newer innovations are to be worked out. Like, creating a social network around a book, or default copyrighted versions of a book, parceled with its audio-books and related novelties. And there might finally come a day, when people, turning pages, might turn over a new leaf!

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