Crystal Ball
Gazing
Reflections on the role
of information resources in a liberal arts eduction
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Crystal Ball
Gazing |
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Traditional publication methods and the digital world do not necessarily need to compete. For example, the editorial director of Random House, Jason Epstein, predicts a world where digital technologies will lead to easier customer access to less-expensive books while providing even larger profits to authors and publishers.
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Looking ahead, he posits an utopian universe in which books will be ordered from the Internet and printed on demand by A.T.M.-like machines, doing away with middlemen and resulting in lower costs for readers. At the same time, writers will have greater freedom to publish what they want and will no longer be at the mercy of timid and puritanical publishers, as Nabokov and Dreiser, were during their careers. "There will be no shelf space problem," he said. "The publisher doesn't buy paper, order a printing, ship books to retail stores. He doesn't need a sales force." In this view Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, unprofitable because their businesses still require middlemen, will become brokers of books. |
In this world, books exist both as digital abstractions and as printed entities. As such, they are printed on demand thereby providing instant universal access to all the world's publications at any local kiosk.