By Iain MacMillan on October 13, 2006
I got most of the way through this New York Times’ article getting excited about the fact that I seemed to be reading a really good review for a new Sony product. It’s been a while. One can get so dispirited sometimes…
Anyway, apart from the de rigeur bashing of CONNECT (Sony’s iTunes equivalent), there seem to be a reasonable amount of good things to be said about the new Sony Reader. But are people going to buy one? For a start, apparently not in Europe (there are no plans to launch here as yet).
To extend the some of the interesting thoughts in the NYT, I reckon the Reader needs to be a lot cooler before it replaces good old “paper” books. Books are undeniably still cool. I think I’d be a little worried about what people would think of me if I sat on tube, peering into my Reader…And that’s one of the problems for Sony’s R&D department, I guess. I was quite happy to ditch my discman for an ipod. But however great an technological achievement the Reader might be, I’m not ready to let go of my Penguin paperback quite yet.
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Iain founded RMM in 2006, with the objective of providing good, strategic advice across all areas of digital and social media. Nowadays, the focus is entirely social and involves the provision of more than just advice – insight, inspiration and expertise in social media. Iain leads the strategy development and training teams on most client projects.
He specialises in leading client strategy projects in a number of sectors, including finance and gambling, where RMM has conducted studies into social behaviour in highly regulated environments. He also leads projects for travel sector clients, a sector in which RMM works in partnership with eCRM sector specialist, Spike Marketing. They work together across a number of clients, most recently including Neilson Holidays, Thomas Cook’s ski and active holidays division.
Prior to RMM, Iain spent five years helping to run the web design business, Tonic, winning and managing accounts such as Vodafone, GE, GAP, MTV and Barclaycard. Before that he worked at Tribal DDB London, working on Volkswagen before heading up the Victor Chandler, Sony Europe and Guardian accounts. And before that he had a colourful career in music promotions, running the annual Soho Jazz Festival in 1997.
Iain spends quite a large amount of time trying and failing to explain to his long-suffering wife why he really loves golf, seventies hard rock and eighties pop. She remains none the wiser.
I think no matter how hard Sony or any other consumer electronic company tries to make a digital book reader, it just won’t be the same as reading an actual book.
There is a huge difference between reading a newspaper article in pdf and reading it in a newspaper.
Perhaps people want to restrict reading off screens to their LCD monitors; they don’t want to carry it with them.
right on. it’s kind of like online grocery shopping.
you can do it, for convenience, but there is something very therapeutic about touching the merchandise and zoning out to a hit or miss soundtrack from younger days.
i am for any technological advances that make life easier, better or just less dreary. but i also have one foot in the camp of real books, newspapers and supermarket shopping.
I went to a rather disappointing talk this week: “Digitise or Die: What is the Future of the Book?” at the Southbank Centre. Margaret Atwood, Andrew O’Hagan, Stephen Page & Erica Wagner spoke almost exclusively about the present of the novel; instead seeing electronic publishing as an invitation to anarchic “sampling” of texts and threats to copyright. Copyright was (incorrectly, IMHO) spun as “the author’s right to preserve the integrity of the text.”
I was left v. irritated. I love books, and I love digital technology. I don’t see why the two shouldn’t go together. Wikipedia, on-board dictionaries, and the internet as a whole have almost wholly replaced functional publications like maps, atlases, encyclopaedias, product manuals, and dictionaries. Blogs are replacing diaries. Google Calendar and Outlook have replaced desk diaries. Most websites are replacing (sadly) brochures.
A lot of these arguments have been laid out, and addressed, a long time ago, by people like Nicholas Negroponte and Ted Nelson.
The quality of screen reading isn’t good yet. But look at how bad it was ten years ago. I think it would be interesting to pull together a quick chart showing increase of screen resolution over time; that would give us an idea of where this is going. Electronic Paper is another exciting development. None of this was addressed; it was a typically English discussion of the future; “we don’t like it, and we’re not going to talk about it.”
Leo – you were there. What did you think?
*applauds*
I have to admit – while I certainly didn’t walk away with any insights into what positive aspects technology could bring to the novel, there was a lot about the session I really enjoyed – being a book-o-phile. It did seem that much of the conversation was obsessed with issues of ownership, best typified by O’Hagan’s quote from an Edith Wharton character; “A keen sense of copyright is the closest thing she has to an emotion”. And I agree with your view that the role of copyright the panel assumed seemed misplaced, I’m unfamiliar with the laws here but in Australia the concept of Moral Rights has been developed with the intention of protecting the integrity of an artist’s work although I think it has only been tested with works of visual art and architecture.
One of the discussions I really felt was relevant to our work was Atwood’s comparison of book reviews to literary essays comparing the former as wedding gossip around the village well (loved the dress, hated the shoes) to the latter’s supposedly exegetic examination of the text. This struck a chord with me as so much of what we read about work in our field is at best gossip. I can’t think where I have seen a piece that thoroughly reviews a campaign or activity (and ok, it probably doesn’t deserve scriptural levels of examination) but surely there’s room for more depth than the current trades seem to supply.
There is also coverage of this event on Alan Patrick’s Broadstuff blog where he was also left with the sense that ”Olde Literature, like Olde Audio and Olde Video, are still not really grasping, grappling with and grabbing the opportunities from the emergence of the Digital Media” http://broadstuff.com/archives/215-Digitise-or-Die-What-is-the-future-of-the-book.html
<pedantic>By “exegetic examination”, do you mean “exegesis” – or even, perhaps, (following your own Orwell rules) “critical interpretation”?</pedantic>
I like your point, though. You’re right. Too much gossip and self-congratulation, not enough analysis. The deeper I dig into the famous case-studies, the more that I feel we often rely on a rumour mill for our data.