Cyberbooks!
May. 13th, 2002 06:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterHad the chance today to get reacquainted with Ben Bova's Cyberbooks, a brilliant little satire on the publishing industry written in 1989. The premise is that a young inventor has come up with an electronic book reading machine...and it threatens to turn the publication industry on its ear. All sorts of skullduggery goes on behind the scenes in two competing publishing houses, and the ending is brilliant.
It's kind of amusing to look back on this book now; as with any prognoisticatory novel, it got quite a few things wrong...but it's kind of neat to see just how much it actually got right. The e-book reader as proposed by inventor Carl Lewis really isn't too much different than a Rocketbook; the optical storage wafers it uses for books seem roughly analogous with today's flash or MMC cards. Bova correctly pegged some of the arguments against e-books--who would want to pay hundreds of dollars for a reader and then have to buy the books--however, the idea that books would only have to cost from a few pennies to a couple of dollars each has proven to be somewhat overly-optimistic. Publishers continue to set the prices, and--with a few noteworthy exceptions--those prices continue to be on a par with the hardcover or paperback versions of the books.
It's kind of ironic, but as far as I know, Cyberbooks is not yet, itself, available as an e-book. Oh well.
It's kind of amusing to look back on this book now; as with any prognoisticatory novel, it got quite a few things wrong...but it's kind of neat to see just how much it actually got right. The e-book reader as proposed by inventor Carl Lewis really isn't too much different than a Rocketbook; the optical storage wafers it uses for books seem roughly analogous with today's flash or MMC cards. Bova correctly pegged some of the arguments against e-books--who would want to pay hundreds of dollars for a reader and then have to buy the books--however, the idea that books would only have to cost from a few pennies to a couple of dollars each has proven to be somewhat overly-optimistic. Publishers continue to set the prices, and--with a few noteworthy exceptions--those prices continue to be on a par with the hardcover or paperback versions of the books.
It's kind of ironic, but as far as I know, Cyberbooks is not yet, itself, available as an e-book. Oh well.