Tech Blog

[#1]

Ow, ow, blinding flash of the obvious! Sony has called it ( sorry Brad ), ebooks are here to stay and poised to overtake print within the next 5 years (via CrunchGear and the Telegraph ). The folks at the Sony eReader division estimate that digital only books will outpace print books by about 2015, but don't worry it's not like paper books are going the way of beta tapes, eight tracks, and video discs, we're just going to have a lot more content produced digitally than ever before.

Ya think?

Sony isn't talking about "regular" websites and blogs, they mean longer works. The things that people would have published as "books" previously. I think that this is awesome and you couple that with authors being able to self-publish (and sell!) their works through the iBookstore and we're building on a great thing for writers.

To help encourage this kind of self-publishing Sony is sponsoring a new category for the Dylan Thomas Prize the "Sony Reader Award for Unpublished Writers". Pity you have to be under 30 to qualify (shucks I miss out again).

So here's the open question: If you have an ereader already, will you still buy dead-tree versions of book or stick with e-versions only?

[#2]

Heh, Tris, I do agree with you, somewhat. eBooks, the concept, is hear to stay. But the current form of eBook is flawed, simply because I can't buy a book using one eBook scheme, and migrate that book to a eBook hardware or software reader I may purchase in the future, due to the restrictive DRM and potential new copyright legislation in Canada.

Until these issues are settled, we've got half the promise with eBooks. That being said, I'm still using mine