Let me share a little secret with you: Books are gonna die. I mean the hard back paper books are gonna die. They’ll be wiped to extinction along with their process owners just like it happened with the cassettes industry. And guess who is going to kill them? Kindle – Amazon and the likes. Ya, I know some will smile skeptically on this tiny claim of mine, but lets wager on that. I swear paper books wouldn’t survivethe next five years on earth! Comments below, sire.
Agree or disagree, what’s more important is that the paper-back-book industry – print – needs to and should die too, IMHO. And thankfully, so it will. Consider this, what is there to paper, that is not there to electronic paper? Or let me put it another way, what is the point of having hard back paper books when the information could be passed on more easily, in a scalable and economical manner? There is no logistics cost, there is no ink or paper cost, not even the cost of “copy-righting” if things moved the way they do on the Internet? And guess what our friendly neighborhood trees are saved from the axe as well, leaving the planet slightly greener than before.
Welcome to Clearwater High School, USA which recently adopted Amazon’s Kindle to change over completely to “paper-less” model of dissemination of knowledge to its students. According to a local news source the changeover is effective immediately and the kids are really excited about it. Other schools are gonna follow suit.
What’s important here is that even in India, we have a few good men vying to create a cheap tablet for the poorest of the poor. And then there are others like Barnes & Noble, Pi, Adam, Illiad, Hanlin, iRex and even the iPad which focus on dissemination of content in a near replacement to paper books too! So where exactly is the market headed? IMHO, there will be (and should be) vertical-rization in the e-paper segment too. Education books are consumed differently than novels or leisure reading which again is different from consumption of content over the internet and so on. Each book, just like in this case Kindle is positioning more towards ‘knowledge-books-school’, others need to carve a niche rapidly to build their own impregnable structure over a period of time.
For a country like USA, actions around Kindle or iPad carry a PR ‘hype’ intent whereas for India the involvement of Government in kick-starting such an initiative is a clear indication of our need rather than a PR story. And thankfully we have Pi from Infibeam, Adam from Notion Ink to fill the empty columns of our market.
But hey did all this divert your attention from original wager: The paper books are gonna die!
What do you think?
