Interesting confluence of ideas today. Firstly, there’s the buzz post by RRW that talks about whether we can ever get away from the good ol’ keyboard and mouse combo.
Secondly, there’s this post by John Scalzi, one of my favourite authors, carrying on a rather fractious and long running debate about e-books vs. print books. Which Scalzi points out, among other things, that assuming e-books are inherently cheaper is a fallacy. Actually his point isn’t so much directly that, rather than in the novel publishing world an authors work causes employment a fair amount of people and that is a Good Thing. The e vs print boiled up in the comment, where Scalzi goes to town on a certain “business background person”.
Note to self: never engage in a word war with someone that does it for a living.
Anyway, getting to my point, which I’m borrowing liberally from Nassim Taleb, I’ll put together another post about his ideas at some point, is that no matter what you think is gonna happen, you’re not going to see the big changes coming.
Paradigm shifts like the replacement of scribes by the printing press are not the shifts that happen over time. One day, you and I will be happily clacking away at pieces of plastic, the next, it will be different.
The main reason that e-books for example haven’t taken off is simply that there isn’t much difference in it. Consider for a moment, that all of the actual improvements when it comes to e-books have been logistical in nature. Improvements such as printing cost, access to material, immediacy of availability, nevery running out of copies or shelf space are all about the logistics of how books get shipped around not about reading them. And don’t get me wrong, I think e-books are great when you’re looking at spreading literacy and education, for the cost of 1 years print textbooks you can deliver free electronic textbooks for an entire academic career.
When you get down to the act of reading though, there is zero positive benefit to e-books over print books. In fact most people still prefer to read off paper. Until we get a shift in the fundamental action there won’t be a shift in the medium. the astute reader will probably point out that there has been at least two such shifts in the last century. Radio and Television have both altered how we can consume content, so they count.
The same argument applies to the keyboard debate, unless there’s a way to create input faster than typing, typing won’t change. But mouse interaction has changed how we interact with computers in a very meaningful way, without replacing keyboards.
There will be major shifts on these mediums, and it will increase our ability to consume and produce content vastly, I’m guessing an order of magnitude like the difference between printing with movable type and a typewriter. But until that happens the current methods will remain largely unchanged, and crucially we won’t know when it’s going to happen, because it’s so far out of our current experience that we are unable to predict accurately. This last bit is the key gem I got from Taleb, so I will expand on it at some point.
Funnily enough more people are reading now, whether on-line or off, than ever. So assuming that the old medium gets removed from the market is also false. Though you don’t get many caligraphed manuscripts these days.
