During a lunch break yesterday I was evesdropping on some Radio 4 chatter about the future of the printed book, if indeed it has a future at all. My colleague said “the book will never die”. I agreed, having seen and been very unimpressed with the e-reader my wife brought home from work one day to try out (she is a librarian). Later that afternoon, however, I saw and experienced the new generation of Kindle, and fell completely in love with it. I want one as soon as I can afford it.
There will never be an actual “end” to printed books, but I think they will become a specialised form and more expensive as a result. There’s no downside from a seller’s point of view – a thousand downloads of an e-book costs them as much as one, so they effectively get to sell something for nothing. If you want a dead tree version, we’ll have to pull out the old press and that’s gonna take time and money, pal.
However, I will go kicking and screaming into the direction that music distribution has taken. I’ve been slow to realise that I am very much fighting a losing battle for the preference of physical media over purely stored data forms. Things have progressed beyond even that, with the current move towards the “cloud”, where people won’t even store their data locally but just access it online when it is needed.
I find this very hard to live with, especially as a musician and music producer! I can record in the studio at 24-bit/192kHz, but the world is increasingly happy listening to their music as MP3s compressed at low bitrate through 2 inch laptop speakers. The way I see it, I’m already compromising by reducing my audio from 24-bit to 16-bit just to get it onto a CD. Soon I don’t think anyone will even care if there’s a kick drum on a recording since most people listening to it hear the equivalent of a petulant but rhythmically consistent ant inside their laptop repeatedly kicking the chassis.
There’s no winning, really. Some will call me a relic for continuing to record at 24/44.1 when I can record at 24/192, while others will continue to say that nothing sounds good unless it’s recorded to 1/4 inch tape, man. Whatever the distinctions in that argument, I can’t shake the growing conviction that the next generation of kids will say “CD? What’s a CD?”
