Two interesting blog postings about the messiness of prediction:
That Whole Internet Thing’s Not Going To Work Out
How to suss out bad tech predictions.
By Farhad Manjoo
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Remember Clifford Stoll and Silicon Snake Oil: “In 1995, Clifford Stoll, an astronomer, author, and mad-scientist type, published a column in Newsweek with a doozy of a headline: “The Internet? Bah!” The piece was based on Stoll’s book, Silicon Snake Oil, in which he argued that we were all being taken for a ride by tech pundits who offered dreamy visions of a coming “information superhighway.” “Baloney,” Stoll wrote. “The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.””
The learnings from Manjoo:
Manjoo lays out four principles for more successful predictions about our digital future:
1. Good predictions are based on current trends
2. Don’t underestimate people’s capacity for change
3. New stuff sometimes come out of the blue
4. These days it’s best to err on the side of (technological) optimism
Now, Nathan Bransford, at his eponymous blog has posted this:
Monday, March 8, 2010
Don’t Believe the E-book Skeptics
He asserts that eBooks will survive and thrive. Here’s the thing he says that the naysayers ignore: “e-books are only going to get better.
Move over Nostradamus, here are some predictions about our digital book future:
1. The e-book reading experience is only going to improve.
2. E-readers and e-books are only going to get cheaper.
3. Finding the books you want to read will only get easier.
4. People are ignoring the digital trend.
5. Habits change”
Good postings and good arguments. Worth reading and discussing.
Stephen
One Response
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I work with disabled students at a university, and have made ebooks before we called them that. The fact is that ebook reading applications are installed on all out computers in the public domain. The ability to listen, mark up and extract content into easier to read or study formats is going to be added to these simple readers. People will want leather seats, good stereos and carpeting in whatever ebook vehicle they drive: meaning full featured equipment is only a step away from these Mickey Mouse appliances that are on the market — they already exists for the disabled. The publishers like John Wiley are already selling ebooks for consumption. It is fascinating how the demand is there, but the publishers drag their feet, thinking they will lose money — maybe they will, and maybe that is part of the change the information age is bringing. Could it be that we live in the information age, and the libraries and booksellers may take a while to understand that things are not the same. The fact is that students want ebooks, and they will find them one way or another.