It looks like a few suits over at Penguin publishing decided to “connect with this whole internet thingy” by turning their eBooks into applications. Because what’s missing when you read a book is a little self-contained social network / entertainment platform. This is the kind of mistake that stems directly from the mistaken idea that the internet is not a communications but a broadcast medium.
What Penguin is missing is that interactivity and community surrounding books already exists, both online and in meatspace. Book clubs, reading lists, and social networking sites like Goodreads already thrive, focusing not on individual titles but on reading itself. Unfortunately for readers trying to more fully expand their passion to the digital plane, this is what the restricted environments of eBook readers and Apple’s iPad are specifically designed to stifle.
The community of literature revolves around people sharing books, digitally or physically, giving recommendations, quoting it, writing fanfics about it, reading it aloud, or creating a video based on it, among other things. Yet every single one of those things is blocked in some way by today’s ownership culture.
If companies like Penguin want readers to fully enjoy books in organic online communities, they would do better to remove the inane anachronistic restrictions surrounding their publications. Attempting to manufacture an ersatz version is yet another costly mistake from an industry that steadfastly refuses to adapt.
2 responses to “Missing the Point”
This seems oddly similar to an instant messenger conversation I had recently with someone.
Anyway, I’ll keep my dead trees for now, thanks. 😉
At least then you’re actually getting something for your money.