Two recent posts from different sides of the Atlantic with slightly different takes on what investment in digital publishing at the moment means.
Raising a few questions about ebooks and the economics behind it, Evan Schnittman on Why Ebooks Must Fail (warning: copy-editing nightmare ahead). What’s interesting is the suggestion – contrary to a lot of hopes – that ebooks, done well, might prove more expensive to produce than print.
On a more positive note, Richard Padley (director of UK-based publishing software company, Semantico) says Now is the time to invest in online publishing (no surprises there given it’s his business he wants publishers to invest in).
I work (and think) in a digital world. However, for me there is nothing quite as good as curling up in bed with a good book – the paper kind. While I believe there is a time and place for ebooks, we need to think about why we want content to be digitised. Lots of arguments for and against.
Agree, totally, but think that part of the problem comes from no one being quite sure what an ebook is. Taking a print book and replicating it on a machine seems like a fairly dull interpretation to me. Taking the same book and letting people annotate it, create bibliographies around it and link it to other books, reviews, blogs etc could work. That said, for me it’s going to be about non-fiction; the fiction I still want between soft covers, a decent illustration on the front, and a good serif font for reading.