Yatterings

Bill Thompson has an article on the BBC website about the changing nature of the printed medium. As he points out, books will not be replaced by the Internet but they will co-exist in the same way the fountain pens co-exist with screens and biros.

Digital publishing will not replace the printed book because of the logistics of reading a novel on screen. Its not easy.

The real question, it seems to me, is what place will books have in the post-Gutenberg era. Perhaps textbooks will become a little rarer (I know of one publisher who is puts their essential medical books onto PDA) and encyclopedias will become vastly rarer but fiction and other forms of non-fiction? Art books even. All will have their place, though sales and thus publishing profits will go down, and they will become like the fountain pen.

As Thompson puts it, the fountain pen does less but it means so much more.