Right here we’ve got yet one more piece of proof to point that the written phrase has begun its unavoidable migration from paper to the digital media. Excellent news for tree huggers; dangerous information for Hammermill, Champion, and anybody who owns a printing press. Not that the tactile enjoyment of a shiny journal or well-produced ebook is probably going to get replaced by a sterile LCD screen any time quickly. And we cannot be closing libraries and changing them with large servers within the foreseeable future. Of extra speedy concern, nevertheless, is the impact the presumed Apple Tablet and the all-too-real Amazon Kindle might have on the supply of all that content material – the writers.
Over the previous 20 years, digitization has modified the music business. Album gross sales have declined over the previous decade to the purpose the place mixed CD and obtain gross sales now symbolize solely a fraction of what CD gross sales alone accounted for in 2000. Hundreds of recording business jobs have disappeared; so have 1000’s of retail file shops throughout the nation. At the moment, the first income supply for the artists is reside performances. Being a rock star ain’t what it was once.
Different types of digitized leisure, comparable to cinema and video games, are managing to carry their very own towards pirate assaults in the intervening time. However as books develop into simply shared digital information, how will the authors and their publishers have the ability to control unlicensed dissemination of the work? Will a Stephen King, a John Grisham, or a Dan Brown proceed to supply entertaining works of fiction when the gross sales {dollars} start to say no? In contrast to music, there is not a really profitable marketplace for reside performances by an writer.
