Here’s NPR’s Morning Edition on eBooks and the perceived value of such, and publisher’s unwillingness or inability to move past old business models.

My favorite piece that I’ve read on this subject lately is TechCrunch’s interview with Marc Andreessen, Burn the Boats. Here’s the best bit, but go and read the whole thing…well worth it.

He comes back to the simple fact that the open Web is where the users are. Talking about paywalls and paid apps is like saying, “We know where the market is and we are not going to go there.” Print newspapers and magazines will never get there, he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats—billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. “At risk is 80% of revenues and headcount,” Andreessen acknowledges, “but shift happens.”

There are lots of things about this tension that libraries will be forced to deal with in the next 5 years, from print vs digital to which of our own particular boats we need to burn.

More details emerged about Apple’s upcoming iBook app just a few days ago when the iPad preorders began. Two things were confirmed that will be of interested to libraries and librarians, I think.

The first is that Apple finally confirmed that you will be able to load non-DRM ePub books onto the iPad via iTunes syncing, in addition to being able to purchase DRM titles directly from Apple. This is great news for anyone who likes reading the classics, as sites like Feedbooks already have nearly all their titles up in Non-DRM ePub format. It’s also good news for booksellers who deal in non-DRM titles, as they will be compatible with Apple’s new “magical” device.

The second, and for my money, more interesting bit of info is that it looks like Apple is defaulting to allowing text-to-speech functionality, the same thing that got the Amazon Kindle into trouble with the Author’s Guild. According to the page linked above:

iBooks works with VoiceOver, the screen reader in iPad, so it can read you the contents of any page.

If I’m parsing this tiny bit of information properly, that sounds like iBook hooks into an OS level text-to-speech convertor, which means that the iPad may be a very capable device for the visually impared. I will be very, very interested to see whether the Apple VoiceOver technology is controlable at the individual book level, and whether publishers can choose to disable it for given books as they do for the Amazon Kindle.

Books in the Age of the iPad

Amazing article about content vs form, and how the iPad will start a revolution of not just digital books, but it may start a rebirth of amazing physical objects.

We’re losing the dredge of the publishing world: disposable books. The book printed without consideration of form or sustainability or longevity. The book produced to be consumed once and then tossed. The book you bin when you’re moving and you need to clean out the closet.

These are the first books to go. And I say it again, good riddance.

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You already know the potential gains: edgier, riskier books in digital form, born from a lower barrier-to-entry to publish. New modes of storytelling. Less environmental impact. A rise in importance of editors. And, yes — paradoxically — a marked increase in the quality of things that do get printed.

Every librarian who worries about the loss of printed material: Read This.