Bring Out Your Dead

Bring out your dead! Monty Python fans, forgive me if that quote is not entirely accurate, but those words have been said for print many times over: “Print is dead, print is dead!” All the experts have been saying that print is a dead medium and we have become a nation of TV-watching drones…or have we? Over the last couple of months, there has been a surge of self-made authors entering the rings. E-books are huge right now; everyone is writing books, and the amount of content out there is about to explode! Who do we have to thank for this? Apple and Amazon are the two companies responsible for this surge. With the release of the iPad and the Kindle, users can now take hundreds—if not thousands—of books with them to read whenever they want, and now thousands and millions of people can easily self-publish their books. Both Apple and Amazon give normal users monetary incentive to write their hearts out. Without the need to go through a publisher or even an editor, users can create and sell their own books with ease. As of this week, Apple released iBooks Author, a free application that everyone with a Macintosh computer can use to create interactive books that mesh perfectly with the Apple iPad. To give you some type of idea, 600,000 users downloaded iBooks Author in one day. That is over a half-million potentially new authors entering the mix. Too many users afraid of the difficulties putting together interactive books now have tools to help them through. Not only did the Kings of Cupertino release a great tool, the new iTunes “U” app for iPad saw three million downloads! It looks like Apple can’t lose, especially with after the surge in their stock. Apple is now the most valuable company in the United States. So it looks like print is not dead. The book will live on; as we have gone from cave painting to paper, we now go from paper to electrons. The new world of information sharing will only get better.