The book, as we know it, has been around for a very long time.
Here in the West we date printing from roughly 1440 when Gutenberg invented the printing press, however the Chinese invented movable clay type even earlier – in 1041. So that’s about 1000 years of print.
That long tradition of print on paper was broken long before the invention of the Kindle – think about reading, and writing, on personal computers – but mass market books that do not rely on paper most definitely date from the introduction of the Kindle.
None of this is news to us. One way or another, none of us would be self-publishing if not for the Kindle, and Amazon. But now that we’ve made the leap to non-paper books, we have to accept that the changes have only just begun. Print lasted for a thousand years. Ereaders are changing every year, and taking the whole idea of books along with them.
One new innovation I discovered recently is something called Booktrack. Continue reading “A Look at BookTech: Booktrack”