Interviews with Digital Media Thought Leaders
Reference Books Are Becoming Obsolete
Podcast Video | Posted by Phil Leigh on December 8, 2007
The For Dummies books are becoming obsolete. Admittedly, titles like Classical Music for Idiots or Greek Mythology for Dummies won’t be affected. However, for titles relating to computers and the Internet a conventional book simply won’t do. Instead a multimedia publication, with embedded instructional videos, is likely to become the future standard.
Earlier this year we moved our website from a custom platform to WordPress. Instructional videos were indispensable aids in making the switch. Learning the process from a conventional book, even with liberal illustrations, would have been significantly more disruptive.
Upon reflection, the experience led me to realize that I never used the last For Dummies book that I had purchased for my video editing software. So if I bought a conventional book on WordPress it might just sit unopened on the shelf as well.
Perhaps it would be better if the For Dummies publisher sold me a subscription to a perpetually updated online manual. While a conventional book might be priced at $25, I would gladly pay $5 a month ($60 a year) for a steady subscription that keeps me constantly updated. WordPress is an open platform and, therefore, ever-changing. To remain competitive, I must stay current on the latest features.
A subscription model would also benefit the For Dummies publisher by providing a recurring revenue stream. At least in my case, the annual stream would likely be significantly more than the price of a book that is not likely to updated more than once every few years.
In general, the reference book category may well be the first within conventional publishing to face technological obsolescence. For example, it is said that the Wikipedia would require a shelf two-miles long to hold it if it were a conventional book. Moreover, the Wikipedia is constantly updated and essentially represents knowledge from the infinite mind of the Internet.
In short, future reference books are likely to become multimedia documents hosted within the Internet cloud either available at no charge, or sold on a subscription basis.
Categories: Podcast Video
Tags: Books, digital media, Future of Books, Internet, Phil Leigh, WordPress
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Having recently given away Encyclopedia Britannica I can relate to this post. Information is fast moving and hard to nail down. I too have never read or used the “for Dummies” series and have a bootload of technical reference books that are just taking up space. On the other hand I have no use for the web’s vast pdf “reference” manuals which are not very user friendly.
Agreed, Jim.
PDF documents are usually nothing but dense Word Documents that have been converted into a format that can’t be edited by w/o authorization.
What is needed is a website with instructional videos that is constantly updated.
As a member of the younger generation. I totally agree with this post. As I do this all the time… We have the internet at our finger tips why go out and look up a reference books. Google has made everythin so accesible. Plus WIki and other sites of the sort are also making it hard for these reference books to survive.