Today’s post covers a lot of ground in one particular area…books and reading. We are in the midst of a sea change in reading caused by the growing insurgence of eReaders (Kindles, Nooks, iPads, et.al.). We are also living in a smaller area of change, where more and more people read online content not from the webpages and the web in general, but from RSS readers, a growing number of aggregation ‘magazines’ such as Flipboard, Pulse, and Zite., and some new services which scrub most of the advertisements off of webpages to facilitate easier reading (i.e. Read it Later, Instapaper, and Readability). The net change from all of this activity is that the income from online advertisements is based upon an idea which is slowly dying out. The income structure of man y websites based upon online ads is about to slowly die out.
What does that mean for us, the unwashed masses who only want to read something without being pestered by all of the gaudy advertisements? I suppose that there are some arguments to make such that we as the consumers have been poaching this content without paying for it (albeit tacitly and without our real knowledge). This is the same argument which has been made about TiVo’s and other digital recording devices attached to your TV…that you can find ways to get around commercials and other irritants to your ability to placidly and limpidly watch TV.
Maybe there is a need to come up with a more forthright way to compensate content creators…who knows?
The Readable Future
http://inessential.com/2011/11/25/the_readable_future
As an addendum to last week’s post about the Codex Seraphinianus, I just found that an equivalently weird opus, the Voynich Manuscript is available online. These two pieces of art (?), hoax (?), or just bewilderment are two of the three great peaks of the world of weird books, leaving only the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili as the last of these Himalayas to reach online (found at MIT press at:
HYPNEROTOMACHIA POLIPHILI
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/hp
Voynich Manuscript online
http://boingboing.net/2011/11/28/voynich-manuscript-online.html
