web culture: July 2009 Archives
Here's an excellent piece by ReadWriteWeb COO Bernard Lunn on the future of the book publishing business. Think about the forces at work in this swirling vortex: traditional publishers, distributors and bookstores; mega-distributors like Amazon.com; eBooks like Kindle; Google, with its aggressive digitization programs; and self-publishing. Do books have a future? Indeed they do. There will always be a place for deep content and ideas that endure. I have books on my shelf that have outlasted my last six computer systems. They have never "checked for updates" or crashed on me. Their very presence is a comfort to me. They smell good.
Take a moment and give books their due. Quoting Henry Ward Beecher: "a little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man's history. It is a man's duty to have books."
