Can you remember where you were when you realized that the film camera was dead? No, not for everyone, but for most people. Or were you thinking, digital cameras are interesting, but they’ll never replace “real film cameras.”
I can remember when the web “came out” and I was working at the ad agency, and two of my bosses were looking at the internet for the first time and both agreed that this was nothing important and that there was absolutely no point to it.
Two years later, the ad agency had a new department dedicated to making stuff for the web. Everyone had some sort of account (mostly AOL) and even the bosses could be caught searching for the main thing at the time: naked people.
That was the time when no one had figured out how to make any money on the web, other than with the naked people. And the web was predominated by men.
And then that all changed and I don’t mean to go through the whole history of the web but there were certain what the economists call “inflection points” and we just hit that with the e-book reader. Amazon reported recently that more than 50% of it’s book sales are for e-books.
For those of you who’ve followed me for a while, I liked and spent money on an early Sony Reader, which I still have, and which still works. But I don’t buy books for it. I would if they were reasonably priced but I still haven’t gotten over the fact that the price for an e-book is about the same as for the paper edition. And then Google came along and scanned every book in the public domain – which is a lot.
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