Dead trees face extinction

Are us writers soon to be out of jobs?

More likely, if books become a digitized commodity, the money won’t be there to produce high-quality ones (and authors all become de facto volunteers). So then we’ll have pseudo-books instead—a cordoned-off collection of curated blog posts masquerading as timely books, distributed online to hand-held reading devices along the lines of Kindle or a netbook. You could already compile one of commentary on the financial crisis. Alongside the collaboratively compiled, rapidly published texts from the publishing industry of the future will be micropublishing, feeding those publishers, things along the lines of blogs and Facebook updates and the like. So maybe it would be more accurate to say authorship will be everywhere and nowhere.

Text and images ©2024 Antony Loewenstein. All rights reserved.

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