Separating the Medium and the Message

Maybe it's a Boomer thing (shout-out to my peeps!), but even ten or fifteen or however many years we are into the Internet Age, it can be  difficult to shake outmoded but deeply ingrained concepts that fuse and confuse content delivery with content consumption. 

I consciously understand the difference. Hell, I make my living producing content that is often consumed in a variety of formats. But the fact that the final paragraph in Randall Stross's New York Times article about Amazon's Kindle e-book got my attention says something about my unconscious frame of reference. 

Stross writes:

The object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell. Kindle’s long-term success is still unknown, but Amazon should be credited with imaginatively redefining its original product line, replacing the book business with the reading business.

Stross's article brought to mind a recent Wired article in which David Byrne discusses future of the music business. In that article, Byrne offers this:

What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over.

Both articles address, to varying degrees and from different angles, how changes in the tools of content consumption continue to change the both the experience of that consumption and the business models built around that experience. What I find fascinating is that the pace of that evolution for music has been so much faster than that for books.

Market forces may be a part of that difference, given that people who buy recorded music, in any form or format, far outnumber those who buy books. But that's nothing new, is it?

The most striking difference, the reason that consumers have been far more willing to accept changes in the tools of music consumption than changes in the tools of the consumption of book content just might be that books were already well ahead of the curve.

By the time tiny, inexpensive transistor radios arrived on the scene in the 1960s, the book, as a tool of consumption, had centuries before achieved comparable levels of portability and user-friendliness. The advent of the paperback in the first half of the last century only increased the book's low-tech technological advantage.  What was the evolution of music delivery technologies, from brittle 78s to vinyl LPs to eight-track to cassette to CD and finally to today's MP3, but an attempt to catch up to the book?

So the struggle to introduce the various new technological tools for reading may have less to do with book lovers' stodgy, bespectacled refusal to let go of the familiar experience of reading a paper-and-ink book, and more to do with the idea that the format had long ago achieved some level of perfection.

Of course, that argument completely ignores the idea of storage. My collection of some 8,000-plus songs fits on one small USB drive the size of a single hardcover book, whereas my modest collection of books occupies ("overwhelms" is more accurate) three long shelves in my den, and six small bookcases in my living room.  So I can see how a well-designed reading device and a digitized library might improve my overall reading experience.