ebooks - the ‘ashtray on a motorbike’ phenomena a market might want

Can you spot the ebook above?

Without descending into a diatribe about McLuhan and co, I believe ebooks as a format and indeed art form are currently utterly immature. Fundamentally this is because the majority of those currently connected with their potential production cannot envisage/understand any viable business models for mass consumption more complicated than a ‘print book to electronic screen’.

Each of these non innovators sit waiting on the other to light the market up and speculate on innovation – the only dull spark to date being kindle. So in a similar context to what happen to TV innovation for fifty years, i.e. we simply got ‘stage’ on screen, ebooks currently lack their own dynamic properties. Apart from mobility, not needing to purchase an additional nightlight and incorporated navigation aids, ebooks in their current form are merely electronic versions of static print. The hardware standards agreement of late 2007 just ring fenced the current hardware players in an industry that doesn’t as yet know what it produces.

So apart form the low cost distributive ease of the ebook, there is little reason to believe that readers or consumers or anyone else for that matter, will actually want something even the potential seller doesn’t understand.

Back in the Black

I was going to create another blog for a specific series of writing projects I'm currently undertaking but I suddenly felt nostalgic for one of the first blogs I ever created - i.e. this one (back in early 2004) Thus I'm coming back to basics, with renewed vigor to play around with information and blogging about some of the digital media materials on my private site clevercelt while also using this blog to describe the creative processes etc that's involved with making those. The other thing of course is anything that appears here must be either public domain, creative commons or indeed my own personal copyright - no stuff belonging to anyone else (without express permission etc).

The photo above is of my son Conor's dog buddy posing for him. Buddy is the Irish Ronaldo of Jack Russels, His specialty is the four footed lunge. What with Euro2008 and all that on TV at the moment, soccer is saturating the airwaves and it's such big business it really is hard to enjoy it without getting a little cynical about the whole thing.