{"id":673,"date":"2007-11-22T00:43:13","date_gmt":"2007-11-22T00:43:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=673"},"modified":"2007-11-22T00:43:13","modified_gmt":"2007-11-22T00:43:13","slug":"mediawatch-is-this-the-end-for-the-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=673","title":{"rendered":"[mediawatch] Is this The End for the book?"},"content":{"rendered":"

No.*
\n* That was the question asked by the Dom Post in the headline an article on Amazon’s new digital reader, the “Kindle”. The article in question is straight off the wire, a piece for the Times<\/a> by James Bone. Except there it had the rather more sensible headline, “The digital reader that will provide 200 books at the touch of a button”.
\nThe DomPost’s doughty subeditors might have found an answer to the question themselves if they’d looked online to find this disappointing review of the very same device<\/a>, from, er, the same edition of the Times, and also by James Bone. Go figure.
\n(Actually, whoever put together the informative sidebar deserves some kind of reward for this bulletpoint: “Like a book, the device’s screen is not backlit and uses electronic ink to mimic paper.”)
\nThe Kindle is going to fail, obviously. There is no market for a standalone book reader. Book-reader functionality will only ever become commercially viable as an add-on for your cellphone.
\nSpeaking of which, I’ve seen this<\/a> article linked from several blogs today. It’s Slate’s piece on how the new generation is moving beyond email, as they take for granted a range of channels (Twitter, Facebook, texting) each suited to a different kind of communication. At the end of the piece, Chad Lorenz writes: “You can now send and receive every kind of message\u2014texts, IMs, e-mails, and Facebook posts\u2014with most new mobile phones. It’s not hard to imagine a future communications command center where, on a single screen, you’ll be able to choose between sending an e-mail, instant message, status note, or blog post\u2014or sending all of them at once\u2014and then have all those bits of text neatly and securely archived.” Yes, exactly<\/a>. Except Chad leaves out two crucial channels: audio and video chat. “Telephone calls” will soon be an outdated term. So will individual call\/text charges – soon you’ll be paying for the bitstream usage of your phone, just like you do for any other internet connection. And that’ll be the end of having to record your contacts on your cellphone SIM, too, because they’ll all be stored online on your MyCell homepage, as your Friends list.
\nI mean, isn’t this obvious to everyone? This is hardly Cory Doctorow insightful futurism. We already have all the pieces. How long will it take before someone starts assembling them?
\nLook for a big telecom to try to buy Facebook sometime in the next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No.* * That was the question asked by the Dom Post in the headline an article on Amazon’s new digital reader, the “Kindle”. The article in question is straight off the wire, a piece for the Times by James Bone. Except there it had the rather more sensible headline, “The digital reader that will provide … Continue reading [mediawatch] Is this The End for the book?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mediawatch"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-aR","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}