My name is Stephen Collins. I am a designer, a developer, a wanna be writer and movie critic.

The internet killed…

There are certainly many things that the internet has supposedly killed… travel agents, real estate brokers, the music business and now the movie business.

But they weren’t really killed were they? People still travel and buy houses. The still make movies and create music. So it’s less of a killing of an industry and more of a changing.

Now, it’s newspapers crying foul and pointing most of their venom at Google this week. Screaming about all the visitors being lost to Google news, while at the same time ignoring all the visitors gained from Google searches.

What will be the next thing? I’m going to put my money on books. I have seen an increasing number of novels and non-fiction pieces in the (what used to be) dark corners of the internet than ever before.

Did everyone hear all the hubbub over the movie ‘Wolverine’ being leaked this week? Does anyone realize that an unfinished copy of the next book in the Twilight series was leaked online? Most people don’t and that’s why there hasn’t been as much of a furor over the leak.

But as newspapers fold, and even more people are driven online to read, as the Kindle and the Kindle iPhone app become more popular and people become even more comfortable reading online and on devices, they are going to realize that it’s just as easy to find books online for free as it is for movies and music.

I think publishers should accept this in advance and plan accordingly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 6:31 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.