Books: This Week > 1950
Amazing stat:
More Books Published This Week Than In 1950 – eBookNewser: “In a presentation at the Digital Book World conference in New York today, author/futurist David Houle shed some perspective on where the publishing industry is today, compared to its place in history.
“There were more books published this week than there were in all of 1950,” he said. Houle told the room full of publishers that the physical book had a great run as an artifact, but encouraged them to embrace the current era of digital publishing to pave the way for future generations.”
We do a great job (theoretically) of teaching students to use freeware books for reading, research and consumption. However, what are we doing to help our students engage with the rapidly dominant digitally published books and materials? How are we developing their abilities to curate and process this firehouse of new information that requires little-to-no vetting process of peer review or editorial boards?
Brave new world indeed.
Get curating, fellow teachers.
Thanks to self publishing expert Jim Kukral for the link via Twitter.
Apples and oranges. I’m not putting down self publishing or ebooks (not here anyway) but that presentation doesn’t consider that in 1950 is was extraordinarily difficult for average people to not just get a book published, but to have the tools, time and desire necessary to write a book. There were also a couple billion fewer people around. Simply put: fewer people were trying to write books. Flash forward to 2012, when anyone that owns a computer can put together an ebook in – literally – 5 minutes. Copy/paste your entire site, page by page, into a PDF, and *bam* you’ve just written a “book”.
So while it’s certainly impressive that more and more people are able to write and be self-published these days, it’s disingenuous to point to the publishing industry in the pre-PC (by about 45 years) era as proof that, “AH-HA! Print publishing is dead!”
(I consider 1995 to be the beginning of the PC era for purposes of discussions like this – Windows 95 broke down barriers to entry like nothing before it, and thanks to the double shot of Win95 + the internet, nearly everyone started outfitting their homes, not just their offices, with home computers).
I’m not so sure the split is as Apple/Oranges as you think.
No one is saying anything is dead, as print books will always have a place on our shelves and in our hearts (some more than others). However, my main takeaway is that we’ve prepared and are preparing and will continue to prepare young people to operate in a treeware world when the reality of information consumption and production is that digital is more prevalent (and just as authoritative) as print.
So, as a teacher, I think we need to be very conscious of how the notions of what makes a “book” are evolving along with society’s needs (both good and bad).