Books: e-book, p-book, a bookshop near you (?) KIndle or iPad?

The plight of the book industry is well known. And bookshops are closing down. Yet, more people than ever are reading books. e-book or p-book? There are a multiple of issues - all canvassed and discussed in this piece in The Guardian "Kindle v Glass, apps v text: the complicated future of books".

"How many e-book consumers realise that some publishers, writers and distributors know an awful lot about their reading style? They have knowledge about how far into the book you’ve reached, when you get bored, which characters you like and those you don’t. Amazon, Apple and Google, along with countless large publishers, embrace the idea of providing products that readers are apparently craving.

It’s yet another way that our digital footprint is commercialised, marketed and analysed. Nothing is private anymore. Curling up on the couch with an e-book is not a solitary act but instead a way for corporations to learn about your habits and then sell you items you’ll think you need.

Novelist Scott Turow told the Wall Street Journal in 2012 that writers still didn’t know who bought their books or why. “If you can find out that a book is too long and you’ve got to be more rigorous in cutting”, Turow said. “Personally I’d love to get the information.” The president of publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux pithily responded: “We’re not going to shorten War and Peace because somebody didn’t finish it.”

Along with the music and newspaper industries, the publishing world is undergoing a profound transformation that will affect every book that you buy or write. A 2009 New Yorker article on whether the Amazon Kindle could “improve on the book”, is today a redundant question. The device, despite its technological limitations and mundane aesthetics, has sold in the millions (not that Amazon ever releases actual sales figures)."

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