Category Archives: news

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Steve Jobs: "People Don’t Read"

Apple’s Steve Jobs, talking to The New York Times about Amazon’s Kindle:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Which means sixty percent of people in the U.S.–180 million people–are, to some degree, readers. More if you count newspapers, magazines, and the web.

It strikes me as odd that Jobs, the head of a company that is doing very well with a less than 9 percent market share*, doesn’t appreciate that.

* UPDATE: Notice how I conflate the size of a market with market share? I think that’s called lying with statistics. Still, I think the larger point stands.

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The iPhone and the Death of Social Media

This post actually has nothing to do with social media, its death, or the iPhone, I just thought a sensational title that was also a transparent lie would drive traffic*. What this is really about is pimping my own post in the Silicon Alley Insider. Which is not a transparent lie (neither the fact of the post, nor its contents), but it is, like the title above, a naked, grasping attempt to drive traffic to Wordie/Errata, and to get my name in a blog I like.

* This will be the title of all Errata posts from now on.

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Text Post Redacto

Jeff Jarvis has a provocative piece on BuzzMachine, titled Post-text?, in which he speculates about the waning of text as it becomes easier for computers to handle audio and video. It reminded me of a comment made recently by my old friend and professor Andrew Lih, that he now listens to the web as much as he reads it.

I love movies. I love This American Life so much that I’ve considered stalking Ira Glass. Last winter we went on a bender and watched all seven seasons of Buffy in three months. But I’m re-reading Neil Postman’s Building a Bridge to the 18th Century right now, and no other medium could possibly convey the depth and breadth of ideas Postman achieves in that slim volume. If books were to be relegated to the same Siberia as, say, epic poetry–a quaint form read in school and by a few eccentrics–it would be a great loss. Not just for nostalgic reasons (though I’m as susceptible to those as anyone), but because the richness of information in a book, and the particular flow state possible when in the thrall of a good one, can’t be equaled by other media.

I think Jarvis and the sources he mentions may be on to something: a lot of the pithy nonsense text on the web is being replaced by pithy nonsense audio and video, which is tantamount to replacing twinkies with snowballs.But long-form narrative is still best conveyed textually.

And for that reason I’m not actually too worried about the fate of text, at least not in the form where it matters the most, in books. There, it still does what it does best. And I know too many kids who are as possessed by books as they are by the rest of the media constellation. But if, God forbid, a text-less dystopia does comes to pass, Wordie is going to be like Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck in On the Beach: the last holdouts, singing “Waltzing Matilda” while we wait for the world to end.

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The Kindle: Books Don’t Need Saving

Todaythe tech and book blogs are all buzzing about the Kindle, Amazon’s attempt at an ereader. The tech blog reports are in-depth to the point of exhaustion, a bit hyperbolic, and overall what you’d expect. They’ve done this before.

That’s not so much the case for the book people, and there’s a whiff of desperation to the coverage, as if the Kindle is a deus ex machina that will help them maintain relevance.
Earth to publishing industry: people like books, and you’re doing just fine. You are not in the same sinking boat as the newspaper people, so chill out. Yes, some kinds of books aren’t so useful anymore (who under the age of 30 still uses a printed dictionary? The online options are superior in every way). But for the reading of long-form narrative, the best option is, and will remain for some time, a book.
For that to change, somebody, probably Apple, is going to have to come up with a far better device than the Kindle. Because I’m lazy, I’m just going to quote the obnoxious comment I left on the OUPblog:
“The older book demographic won’t buy [the Kindle] because they’re not gadget people, and young readers (yes, young people do read books) won’t because it’s fugly, and they’re already lugging around an iPod, smartphone, and laptop. On top of those devices, the Kindle is a redundant piece of crap.

Once again it’s going to be left to Apple to get this right. Schnittman is correct that any media device has to be networked, and have easy access to an enormous reservoir of content. But it has to be beautiful, or at least attractive, and it has do more than one thing. The iPhone is beautiful and multifunctional, for the same price as a Kindle. Speaking of price, who in their right mind is going to pay $14/month for the New York Times, in this emasculated, black and white, linkless form? Or $2/month for a bunch of otherwise free blogs? If they get 17 subscriptions, I’ll be shocked.

The Kindle is going to go down like the Lusitania.”