Digital books and the trade-in model
The future of books is digital. That much is obvious. There are many people out there who think this is an impossibility, but those folks are probably the same people who once said MP3 would never make it because people "like having CDs". Digital books have so many advantages over paper books - readability, instant search, automatic updates to the content, portability, instant purchase, and so on - that this game will be over much faster once it really kicks in than the migration to digital music was. The technology is just now catching up with the desire, so I expect that over the next decade people are going to switch to digital books en masse.
Note that I don't say "eBooks", because I think the digital book will be dramatically different than the 1999 eBook. The hardware will be much more appealing to book worms - possibly with digital pages that actually flip - and the fonts and rendering technology will be wondrous. The dedicated device will be connected to the net for instant download (via an iTunes-like store, probably provided by Amazon.com and B&N) of new books, magazines, newspapers, and other types of content. Have you ever been on the isle of Bora Bora, where there isn't a bookstore in sight for miles, and run out of reading material 4 days before boarding a plane to go home? I have. Never again.
Of course, this will only be a pleasant transition if used book stores, retailers, or "web 4.0" startups figure out how to provide trade-in value for existing books. As someone who has purchased 100+ books over the course of the last decade, I have no desire to repurchase them just to convert them to the digital format. Instead, I want to be able to drop off the books at a used book store and be given a credit towards the digital book for download. I want to replace all existing paper books with digital books in the year 2012 but I don't want to pay retail for the privilege (although $.50/book would be fine)
Sound familiar? It's essentially what millions of people have been doing with CDs. We've been ripping, mixing, and burning for a while now and many people are finally at a point where 100% of their music collection is digital. It's fantastic not to have CD clutter lining the walls of my home any longer; the CDs I still have are in a CD book filed away in the closet.
If the transition to digital books supports a trade-in model, it could potentially be accelerated. Let's not make people repurchase their books again. This is assuming there isn't some crazy iTunes-like big brother DRM attached to every book, of course. I wonder if there's a business model hidden in here for someone.
Sidebar: there's at least one relatively decent reader out now from Sony with a very crisp display. I'm sure there are others as well, but the "iPod" of digital books is probably a few years out; the device that makes it so painfully obvious why digital books are the way to go. For some people, this might just be the iPhone, a Windows Mobile phone, or the equivalent - something with a nice-sized screen, Internet connectivity, and always in your pocket. For others, it may be a dedicated device.
Herramientas 
Ayuda
