I think there's a lesson here for booksellers and publishers. The cassette tape did not bankrupt the music industry. People have had access to the technical means to create low-quality copies of music for a long time. This did not hurt their business whatsoever. If everyone has a DIY Book Scanner in his basement, they might turn out ebooks that may even be word-for-word perfect after OCR (good luck, that), but they'll still lack the design touches that create the impression of quality.univurshul wrote:--I've been thinking along these same lines, and I'm a serious vinyl collector! But you know: I listen to music most of the time on my iPhone. I take my music everywhere, and a ton of it. I transcribe my records to iTunes, I have all my albums finally transcribed.StevePoling wrote:...This makes me think that DIY book scans are like cassette tapes were in the 1970s. I recorded songs off the air for free, or dubbed it off an LP, but the quality on the hand-lettered cassette just sucked.
ebook design is a big deal. It also affects commercially produced ebooks. I just read a book about the Depression. Most books like this have a section of about 10 to 20 pages of photos printed on glossy stock and bound into the middle of the book. This is done because binding individual glossy pages at random intervals in a conventional book is prohibitively expensive. But putting photos at any point in an ebook is trivial. The publishers of the book just put the photos into the ebook at the same point they would have bound them into the paper book. Lazy and stupid. At least they move the photos at a chapter boundary. The ebook is much easier to read if the publisher moves each picture to the first corresponding index entry. I had to skip through about 20 pages of images that showed up in a slapdash fashion, then pick up the chapter mid-sentence. On a Kindle that's the wrong answer.