Monday 18 July 2011

The end of the printed books...

Well of course that the printed books will last forever, but maybe the printed book will be really exclusive (well maybe not as during the medieval age before the printing press, when one illuminated book was of a value of a house), but I guess that prices as 200 euros for book will be real one day...

So what has changed so much? Well I personally own an ebook reader for couple of months and have to say, that:

a) since then I bought aproximately 80 % less printed books than through the usual period
b) most of the profits will be to those who are manufacturers of the ebook readers (have you heard about pirated hardware?)
c) lot of printing houses will go bankrupt - less range of QUALITY books will be available, only those books, which are able to make profit (= written for stupid fucks) will be published
d) one book is enough for a family, but not one ebook reader. You can wait till you read the printed book and then give it to other family member, but this never happnes with the ebook reader, you need it for another book, right. So whole family and each one has an ebook reader, that is the dream of the manufacturers.
e) there are several websites on the Czech internet with like 10 thousand pirated books each. This means there are "out there" really hundreds of losers with lot of free time, so they can buy, scan, OCR the book and convert it to unprotected format. And imagine that the obscure Czech language is spoken only by aprox 10 mil. inhabitants of the World. Now imagine how many pirated books have to be out there in English! Bad thing is, that most of the pirates are lovers of sci-fi and fantasy (well maybe it is because they are 12 yrs old!), which is mostly shit apart from few authors, so these two genres will die first, I guess...

I think that with the availability of the pirated content (even 6year old could google for pirated books) the book industry will be even more fucked than the music industry. Which is kinda bad, because the diversity will be lowered and only mainstream authors, who write bestsellers, can theoretically be succesful also on the ebook platform.

Well the dark times are ahead... sure it is great to read books on ebook reader, but this sword can surely backstab.

Tuesday 12 July 2011

One senctence out of context...

I am now reading one book by Hannah Arendt and there is this small part of one big sentence, which I really like. It is translated from Czech, so...

"...in a conversation between me and myself, that is on the road, where arise big philosophical and metaphysical questions..."