Reading Atoms and Bits

Chris Anderson had a number of topically relevant points in his excellent book "The Long Tail", but the one that resonated the most for me in subsequent days was his point about Atoms vs. Bits, and the shifting balance of delivery of information and entertainment electronically versus physically.

His most notable example of this was Amazon, which now publishes books and presses CDs to reduce inventory costs and ship-time. We are already getting close to dis-intermediating portions of the distribution chain with iTMS for music, and burgeoning sites like CinemaNow and MovieLink for movies (with some fleas on the latter dog). What we do not have yet is the book equivalent of the iPod, an e-book/e-ink reader. They have been proposed, prototyped and not widely deployed yet. Why?

I'd love to be able to travel with all of my library when I leave my home state, just as I travel with a substantial percentage of my CD library on my iPod. An e-book reader that tied in to my MacBookPro with bluetooth or wifi for content loading that I could read, as well as draw upon when searching for 'that one quote'.

A good first start en-route to this updated (read 'Digital') age would be to include a link to the audiobook and e-book with a paper-purchased book. The next step would be to find a method to keep the paper, e-ink, and audio versions of the books synchronized, so you don't have to scan around looking for your page.

More on this later. -C

Comments

[ddumping]

Here are some links that I believe will be interested