TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

The New Yorker has a great piece on the future of publishing, and how Apple and Amazon are changing it.

One section:

According to Grandinetti, publishers are asking the wrong questions. “The real competition here is not, in our view, between the hardcover book and the e-book,” he says. “TV, movies, Web browsing, video games are all competing for people’s valuable time. And if the book doesn’t compete we think that over time the industry will suffer. Look at the price points of digital goods in other media. I read a newspaper this morning online, and it didn’t cost me anything. Look at the price of rental movies. Look at the price of music. In a lot of respects, teaching a customer to pay ten dollars for a digital book is a great accomplishment.”

That’s the right question for publishers to be asking, but the answer given is wrong. Publishers think multimedia books are the answer. Books with video and other interactive elements.

Maybe that’s what some kind of books need–straight entertainment books–but that isn’t what will save books. If we turn all books into this, we won’t have books at all. Books, fundamentally, are about quiet, contemplative thought and imagination.

We need a convincing reading experience and means of handling books. We’re getting the former with the iPad and Kindle, but the latter hasn’t been solved yet. We can’t easily share ebooks or take notes in their margins, nor do we have the assurance that we can read that same book in fifty years.

A real book is timeless. If I read it, write my thoughts down on the page with a pen and sit it on my bookshelf, I can go back to it any time in the future and read it, along with my thoughts. I can hand them down to my children, and they can to their children. Books are, in that way, timeless. There’s no risk of file format obsolescence or server failure.

Those are the issues that need solved.