(Thumbnail image: Michael's Tech Blog)
The old-fashioned night in, curled up on the couch with a good book, might be just that—old fashioned. When online retailer Amazon.com announced electronic reader Kindle outsold traditional printed books this holiday season, many began to ask—Are paper books becoming a thing of the past?
We’re looking at perspectives from CBS, NPR, KGO-TV, The Wall Street Journal, and The Telegraph.
Let’s go first to CBS, where a journalism professor tells us why he thinks electronic readers have gotten so popular.
“The Internet abhors middle men. It abhors waste. It creates direct connections, so what happens now is an author can write a book and it can go on the Kindle in no time flat. You don’t need that whole process—the middle men and the publishers, the retail chain.”
But flipping an actual page represents a romanticism many worry may be lost with electronic readers like the Kindle.
Here’s writer Nicholas Carr on NPR.
“Here was a technology that encouraged people to read deeply and read with great concentration and focus, and I think as we move to the new technology of the screen… you’ll see a retreat from the kind of sophistication and eloquence that characterize the printed page.”
Potential disadvantages aside, San Francisco’s ABC affiliate reports the stock market is jumping on the bandwagon.
“Barnes and Noble lost value in December with a stock price under $20. Amazon, however, is celebrating Kindle and its December sales, closing at just under $140 a share.”
While that’s good news for Amazon, an article in the UK’s The Telegraph says the retailer’s recent success might be temporary.
“E-readers like the Kindle were a fashionable Christmas present this year… [I]t’s hardly surprising that there was a surge in e-book sales the same day. It’ll be more interesting to see what the statistics are like by 25 January 2010. I suspect we’ll see a respectable surge of old fashioned book sales for the long winter evenings.”
So how do you prefer to read—from the pages of a traditional book, or with the ease of a handheld electronic device?
Writer: Christina Hartman
Producer: Lee Morehouse
