Why e-books will leapfrog paper books: Michael Hart’s cellphone comparison
“By end of the year, half of the potential world market will have a working cell phone, while the majority of the world will still never have made a land line phone call. It is going to be a similar story with paper books vs. eBooks.” - Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart.
Related: Project Gutenberg—its history and purpose—gets a nice writeup in Red Hat Magainze. Something to show friends?
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July 1st, 2007 at 3:53 pm
The claim that half the world have never made a phone call is one of those attractive sound bites which turn out to have no supporting evidence. Clay Shirky calls it a ‘factoid’. See his page at
http://www.shirky.com/writings/half_the_world.html
for a comprehensive breakdown of this myth and the static thinking behind it.
July 1st, 2007 at 4:04 pm
Thanks, Jon–I love to see factoids exposed. That said, Michael’s main point survives. E-book infrastructure is the future. - David
July 1st, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Thanks to Jon Jermey for the pointer to the very valuable article by Clay Shirky from 2002.
Note that Hart actually said something somewhat different than the claim that Shirky discusses because Hart spoke about “land line” phone calls. He said “the majority of the world will still never have made a land line phone call.” It would be interesting to have a citation for Hart’s claim if it exists. Hart made another claim “By end of the year, half of the potential world market will have a working cell phone”. This also differs somewhat from the question Shirky examines. What is the “potential world market”? Every person older than ten? The question seems ill-defined without more details.