| Author | Message | ||
     Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.159.65.204 |
I've just received (in the workplace) a press release from some organisation declaring that 'because of Web 3.0', all 'analogue' [aka 'offline'] publishers not geared up to go immediately 'digital' [aka 'online'] are facing immediate commercial death. The New York Times is cited as an example. Even granted that this is typically vacuous Net-babble, there's no escaping the fact that the infrastructure of book publishing is disappearing faster than a human face in a Fulci acid-bath. Within a couple of years there will be no booksellers and no book publishers. And who, apart from that grinning sociopath Bill Gates, decided this was a great idea? Would you buy a book that you had to go on spending money on every week to keep it from disintegrating? Would you buy a book that half the time you couldn't open, or opened to find its pages suddenly blank, because you hadn't paid enough money to enough people? Would you buy a book from a bookseller that charged you £1.50 a minute to talk to it about a problem with its products? Would you buy a book that you had to replace every couple of years? What is this shit? How did our culture get flattened out and replaced with a synthetic replica? And why does the existence of a new communication medium mean that the old ones have to be smashed to dust? Whatever the answers, it's too late now. I give up. I mean it. I can't even make the | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.219.8.243 |
I know how you feel, Joel. The world is a plastic place filled with plastic people; whatever feelinmgs I once had are being slowly replaced with empty data. | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 79.70.77.33 |
It is indeed all shit and I feel the same as the both of you. My only salvation is that I see my daughter devouring books, actually playing and wanting to adopt/save something, balancing her life alongside the computer. She loves to read. We don't have a television in every room in the house like many children seem to see these days. Only yesterday she sent a petition around the children in the library to save the after school computer club. Most kid's wanted it saving because it is fun. Heather said she wanted to inprove on her socializing skills, (she has them in abundance already,) and it is fun. She watches the American kid's programmes because she likes them and wants to fit in. I lament that they all seem to be American. I prefer to spend longer periods of time alone - hardly speaking to anyone other than artists/writers/musicians/readers of books etc, people with passion, than have any more boring conversations with plastic people who buy the celebrity books. And can someone please tell me why we had to have a chinese security force running alongside that torch with the police the other day. Didn't look right - Australia will have none of that. | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 79.70.77.33 |
You've started me off Joel and Gary. Here was I lingering in a limbo between caring about hardly anything at all and nothing at all. | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 212.74.96.200 |
PDF books just don't smell right. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.17.13.65 |
Don't sweat it Joel: books have been around a long time, and I don't care what they come up with, they're not going away. If some publishers fold, others will come in and fill the gap. When you start to actually hear real people talk glowingly about their exciting new pdf? When book-burnings become cultural events? When Borders and Barnes & Noble stock a Classics flash-drives section?... Until then, parchments will crumble of their own accord.  | ||
| Niki Flynn (Niki) Username: Niki Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.32.69.29 |
There are too many people who want the feel of solid paper in their hands, the smell of it, the heft of it, the portability of it, the non-headache-inducingness of it. (Sorry, had a bit of riesling tonight.) I don't think e-books will ever replace real books. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.2.133.184 |
...just as video never killed the cinemas. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.219.8.243 |
And video killed the radio star. | ||
| John_l_probert (John_l_probert) Username: John_l_probert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 90.208.214.24 |
We are indeed living in the plastic age | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.236.131 |
"I know how you feel, Joel. The world is a plastic place filled with plastic people; whatever feelings I once had are being slowly replaced with empty data." HA! That's hilarious. Do it again. Or should I say 00011010 011100001 010010010001? | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.236.131 |
Funny. A physical paper book feels like it brings us closer to the author by being a solid object. Yet a pdf or other form of computer text is actually, now, a closer representation of the original wordprocessed creation. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.219.8.243 |
Reading books doesn't hurt your eyes; reading froma screen fucks with you and gives you a headache. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 81.153.251.53 |
Someone wrote to me a few weeks ago and told me this 1989 vignette of mine was a masterpiece of scatology and should be known better. (And yesterday someone wrote a comment on the blog about a musician in California with the same name). | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 81.153.251.53 |
Sorry that link didn't work. HERE it is. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 81.153.251.53 |
Now a fable for the BP slick? Or just more s***t? |