“The Future of the Book in the Digital Age” – Updated!

I’ve just started reading a handful of books on professional issues to help me fruitfully utilise (or fruitilise) the time before I start my new job in January.

One of the more promising is “The Future of the Book in the Digital Age” – all about e-books, print-on-demand, digitisation and so on. A topic of great interest to me. I’ve read dozens of out-of-copyright books in plain text format from my own laptop and a free Internet connection in my local public library before now, so I’m not exactly averse to the idea.

When I re-started the Imperial College Physics Society newsletter, one of the first stories we ran was on e-ink, which has finally caught wide attention as the technology behind the Amazon Kindle. So I feel that this story is in some sense mine.

I’ll be adding to this post as I progress through the book!

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Well, I’ve gotten considerable more further, and enjoyed the book. The situation sure is complex, partner. The message seems to be, overall, that the media are just mixed in together, with an amazing variety of contexts for use determining the type of medium used. There’s no straightforward technological determinism, despite huge changes in some media, like those DeSaulles noted recently.

It seems that just as people use, for example, email, telephones, text messages, postal services, etc. for basically the same activity, so there are miriad economic, social, aesthetic etc. factors involved in book “use”. Fascinating stuff but hard to summarise in one blog post!

The bottom line for information professionals, I think, is to remain flexible. Formats and media will come and go, and there’s a need for people who are able to identify the core concepts that apply across the board (e.g. the book as an organised intellectual “work” that can be “instantiated” in various ways). The other side of the coin is knowing how much you need to know to implement the appropriate medium in the concrete working environment.

A really wide-ranging book, and actually quite fun to read, for the variety of topics and disciplines, the wide variety of English styles used and the topical subject!