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Everything is Hype

The Shifted Librarian

Can someone please explain to me when it was decided that ebooks would completely replace printed books? Why is it so difficult for the media (let alone publishers) to view them as a complementary instead? (That's a rhetorical question.)

I would imagine it was because of the tech industry's usual breathless hype at the time about how eBooks meant the death of the printed book. Much like the breathless hype going on now about how blogs will utterly crush journalism as we know it. Hype, especially the tech industry's particular futurist brand of it, owes much to advertising in its absolutist, binary, black-and-white approach. It knows nothing of complementary, since that doesn't fit the frenetic upgrade cycle ("Jesus, the new speedbumped iBooks are out! Jaguar DEPENDS on them! Aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" Not that I'm invulnerable to this myself, but it pisses me off that I'm not) that it depends on for survival. See most of WiReD's copy for the past, what, 5 years, almost anything by Kevin Kelly and the hippie farts at the Well, and everything by Doc "Joisey WiFi, fuckin' a" Searls.