From pancake people to horses. The metaphors are piling up (no pun intended.) Jeffrey Bezos, chairman, president and chief executive of Amazom.com, Inc. talked about changing reading behavior in an interview with Wall Street Journal’s techie Mr. Mossberg. Mossberg interviewed several well-known uber-techies in the All Things Digital special section of Monday’s WSJ. In “The Way We Read,” Bezos talks about the electronic book device called Kindle being marketed (Where? They don’t have any around here) worldwide.
Mossberg asks if books are going to be facing a decline in people needing the physical, tactile touch of books and newspapers. Bezos responds: “Over some time horizon, books will be read on electronic devices. Physical books won’t completely go away, just as horses haven’t completely gone away. … It’s very hard to find a technology that has remained in mostly the same form for 500 years. And anything that has stubbornly resisted improvement for 500 years is going to be hard to improve.”
When Mossberg asks about the “people who talk about the tactile feel of the book – the hard to describe intangibles around reading a paper book that you lose on an electronic device,” Bezos responds: “I’m sure people love their horses, too. But you’re not going to keep riding your horse to work just because you love your horse.”
In another article in the same All things Digital section, Rupert Murdoch speculates on the future of the printed newspaper. “…over the last 10 or 15 years, they have made every economy possible in production, with computers and so on, but not in journalism. Now they have to turn to journalism and they are going to deteriorate tremendously.”
What we need is a rebellion. Am I so far left behind that I can’t see the writing for the horses a..? Murdoch goes on to say papers might last another twenty or thirty years, but there is a huge opportunity for a paper for the 10 percent most influential, most affluent, best educated people in the community.” It’s all going on the Web, according to Murdoch.
I just can’t see myself getting all my reading the news solely on an electronic device. I don’t want to carry a Kindle in my bag as I commute back and forth to work. I don’t want to prop myself up in my bed (my husband calls the set up a throne) and dump a Kindle on my chest or belly and read from it. So what if I can download a gazillion books? I only need one, the one I’m reading. Besides what would I do with all the space now taken up by my bedside book piles?
As a member of the market segment that is going to be the majority of the population (at least in the U.S.) within the next ten years, I say companies have to wake up to the demographics and keep on providing and improving upon the technologies that got them where they are today and not dispose of them like a horse, put out to pasture and called only when someone wants to pet it. I don’t know about any of you, but I will keep demanding what suits me physically – for my eyes and hands to partake when I want to be comfortable, not seated at a computer. I will be the horse that stubbornly resists for the next 500 years. Do they call that a mule? Okay, I’m a mule. Join me as we stand our ground.
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