The Mindset!

I just finished watching an interview with Steven Levitan and Lloyd Braun on the allthingsd.com website. It got me thinking about what I had discussed in an earlier post. When traditional companies look at the digital world, they see it as an ancillary product to the traditional medium. This is not right or wrong, it simply is. Why? Again. referring back to the previous post, technology filters up from the kids (and to an extent the early adaptors), to the decision makers in many of these media spaces. Also,it becomes a matter of money. Who will pay what for what content so that we can maintain a profitable business model. This is not to say that a digital model cannot be profitable. It just requires a different mindset.

Having said that, they did not exactly answer the question, point blank, about how to go about changing things. They both realize that they are in a system that is extremely monolithic and needs to address the shareholders, analysts etc. This is no different from other media providers. Traditional publishers have been around for a long time (millennia, in fact), whereas the digital world has only been around for a small portion of that. However, given that the digital world changes and evolves so quickly, these timeframes can be viewed as relative. Nevertheless, as things evolve, the digital media becomes more prevalent. The real issue becomes, how can we make it so that individuals find the technology easy to use and have a good experience with it. It will never have the look, feel or smell of a real book, and people will miss that, I know I do. At the same time, however, I enjoy the convenience of having multiple books to read at my fingertips, without having to pack an extra bag just to bring them with me. I skipped a beat, yes, I'm back on the ebook thing. Why? lately it has become a bit of a pet peeve with me.

The more I look into this [ebooks], the more I see room for improvement. The technology is still in its infancy, this is clear. The end-user is not getting the convenience they ultimately should, however, as I said, the technology is still in its infancy. How can we improve on this? Well, for starters, make the technology actually take advantage of the technology. Why are we trying to maintain a paper paradigm in a digital world? Who says that the pages have to 'flip'/'turn'? Why do we not allow the user to determine how they want the book read? Granted, some do so. Not all. Maybe, it is time that we asked the end-user!