Old music industry issues about DRM and self-publishing are playing out again in the world of e-books
The satirical UK magazine Private Eye features a cartoon called Snipcock and Tweed, which pokes fun at the dusty world of book publishing.
In one issue, they are confronted with an e-book and conclude that it spells doom for traditional books. “Thank God for that,” they cry, as they ponder a bookshop window full of crappy diet books, TV spin-offs and celeb biogs.
Funny, but frankly it’s the same stuff that shifts on digital formats as paper. A glance at the weekly chart of Gospoken, the D2C storefront of UK mobile book distributor Mobcast, reveals the usual slew of James Pattersons and Jodi Picoults.
At least they’re selling. Indeed, it seems that the debate about whether books would follow music and go digital is over. There’s little doubt they will. It’s just a question of how completely e-books overwhelm paper. This is not clear cut. After all, music fans like to take their entire music collection everywhere with them and want to have choice.
But book lovers only have one or two books on the go at any one time. Is anyone really going to digitise their entire book collection? Click here to read the full article.
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