The Future of the Book Is the Stream
Cloud storage is paving the way for books that are sold not by title, but by time.
What Netflix’s Watch Instantly has done for movies, and what Spotify has done for music, Audiobooks could do for books. The service has the potential to reframe book-buying as a transactional thing, making it less about purchasing an object, and more about purchasing an experience. In fact — convergence!
“THE future”–almost automatically wrong
I’m now at the point where any article headlined with something like The future of the book isn’t even worth reading. There’s no single “The future” of the book. But I guess projecting a highly implausible monotonic future makes for good headlines.