I was going to take a shot at predicting what we would see by the end of the approaching decade but, with the speed things are changing and evolving, I decided it would be safer to limit myself to just one year. My 2010 predictions are:
1. The interest in mobile readers (iPhone, Kindle, Nook, others we haven’t heard of yet) will continue to snowball with as many as 50 percent of people regularly getting part of their news, work, and entertainment reading via a mobile device.
2. By the end of 2010 no one e-reader device will have cornered the market, but the majority of books, magazines, and other material available on one will be available on the others. The difference will be the quality of the experience with the better ones offering a robust mix of media including color, images, sound, video, and text.
3. We will see new, exciting, innovative, and useful ways “aggregators” will slice and dice others’ digital material and deliver it to market. For instance, your favorite movie star may piece together an e-cookbook using copy-righted material obtained piecemeal from other cookbooks residing in print-on-demad digital repositories. The repositories will then forward a small royalty to the original cookbook publishers each time a copy of the star’s e-cookbook is sold. (Madonna’s Guide to Barbequing Au Natural?) This will also work for professors who want to mix individual book chapters and magazine articles from multiple sources to form their own textbooks.
4. Our ability to quickly—and cheaply—obtain information of all kinds will continue to expand. This will put pressure on those used to charging for this information to find a new economic model, which they—or others, if they fail—will.
5. The Pope will remain Catholic.
The last one is insurance so, come 2011, I can claim at least some degree of prophetic success.
Happy New Year.
Just a Write Thought.