Microsoft CEO Bill Gates delivered a lengthy speech about the future of media and advertising last Tuesday at a conference in Seattle, and he spent a fair portion of it talking specifically about the future of print. Seattle-based technology blogger Todd Bishop has posted several excerpts from Gates’ speech, including this one:
Reading is going to go completely online. We believe that as we get the smaller form factor, the screen has gotten good enough. Why is reading online better? It’s up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links. The ads in the online reading are completely targeted as opposed to just being run-of-print, where many of the readers will find them completely irrelevant. The ads can be in new and richer formats. In fact the only drawbacks of the digital form are the things associated with the device: how big is it, heavy is it, how many hours of power does it have, how much do I have to spend to buy it? But those are things that once you achieve that threshold, in terms of the convenience and the cost, then you see a dramatic change in behavior. [...] Somewhere in the next five-year period we’ll hit that transition point, and things will be even more dramatic than they are today.
Not that Gates would be biased toward technology or anything. A more convincing examination of the future of e-reading can be found on the Guardian’s website, where author and technophobe Andrew Marr writes about his month-long experience using the iRex Iliad, which has been touted as one of the first truly usable e-readers on the market.
(Thanks to Quillblog reader Jennifer Lambert for pointing out the Gates link.)
