[FYI] "A pretext to committing suicide"

[Kristian Köhntopp <kk@netuse.de>]

Jemand (Axel?) schob die Liste der Attribute für digitale Bücher auf
diese Liste. Dazu Jon Katz auf /.:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/03/20/1816237&mode=nocomment

Biting The Bullet: Publishing And The Net

[ Technology ] Posted by JonKatz on 3:53 21st March, 2000
from the horror-story-cannibalizing-books-online- dept.

By e-distributing a Stephen King novella last week, the publishing industry lumbered
in the footsteps of its dinosaur-cousin, the newspaper business, which has wasted
hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years on mostly useless and unprofitable
Web sites. But it forgot to produce better or different papers, an enormous mistake,
and publishers are making the same mistake. Why interactivity isn't about delivery,
but attitude and content. Read more. 

Like the newspaper industry, publishing thinks it can enter the digital age by
switching formats. It shows little interest in examining, dismantling and re-assembling
its own rusty culture, something admittedly tough for any entrenched institution to
do. So like newspapers, book publishers are making it clearer by the month that
they would rather die than really change. 

For nearly a decade now the newspaper industry has been using the Internet as a
pretext for committing cultural suicide -- for cannibalizing its own form and attributes
in a panicky response to new information technologies. Some of these
once-influential papers may evolve into profitable information Web sites. But
increasingly, it appears that most newspapers will not survive at all, at least in their
familiar form. We'll never know how interesting or successful newspapers might
have become if they'd have taken all the money they've spent on tepid Web sites
and simply made their papers better. All that's really clear is that year by year,
papers have become more marginalized, less vital. 

...

-- 
Kristian Köhntopp, NetUSE Kommunikationstechnologie GmbH
Siemenswall, D-24107 Kiel, Germany, +49 431 386 436 00
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