I had to read this paragraph twice to make sure I'd read it right.
... millions of books will, soon enough, be online only. And that will mean the same kind of ability to buy chapters or extracts that music-buyers have enjoyed courtesy of itunes. Bundling is all but dead - along with warehouses full of expensive, slow-moving stock, and many wholesalers and retailers. At the leading edge is, among others, a San Francisco start-up called Inkling which is offering interactive, multimedia-rich iPad versions of more than 100 textbooks by the chapter or complete book. As ever, you have to look East to see the leaps of progress and the South Korean government this month announced all its schools would be paperless by 2015 with "perennially-updated" online textbooks. And the recent snaffling by Pearson (owner of Penguin and Dorling Kindersley and academic imprints) of online operations from failed booksellers Borders and Angus & Robertson speaks errr volumes. [Emphasis mine]
From the article, Cooking the Books: Harry Potter Rushes into the new World, by Colin Morrison
Yup, definitely the wave of the very near future. In ten years kids will laugh to think that we used pens an paper, but oh well (shrug) :)
ReplyDeletelol, yes, I mentioned to someone that when I was a kid there was no world-wide-web and they gave me a look that made me feel about 1,000 years old!
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