Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Perspective: The Impact of the Kindle on Jobs
The transistor was discovered by researchers at Bell Labs in 1947and marked the
beginning of digital technology. This remarkable and transforming development has led
to such commercial applications as the PC computer, the cell phone, the I-phone, the
CD and DVR, the digital camera and the recent conversion of the rabbit-ear TV, just to
mention a few. In other words most of the modern communication gadgets we have
learned to love. The rate of adoption of this new technology is exponential, and we have
not seen anything yet.
One of the latest applications for digital technology is the Kindle. This is an electronic
book introduced by Amazon on November 19, 2007. They named it Kindle as in kindling
a fire. Figuratively speaking, it has done just that! In a blog I wrote last April I speculated
that one of the books that could be downloaded onto the Kindle at some future date
would be students’ text books. Well, guess what? The town of Clearwater, Florida bought
2200 Kindles for their 2100 high school students for the current school year. All of the
texts to be used have been down loaded into the Kindle. The students can also download
novels, take notes on and highlight portions of the texts. The Kindles can also read the
text aloud.
With such a dramatic and significant development you would think that every news
organization in our Nation would have put the story on the front page. But have you read
or heard about this on the evening news? I doubt it. I heard about it via a tip I got from
Facebook. Then a Google check led me to an article about it in the September 16, 2010
issue of Tampa Bay Online. The Tampa article claims that the Clearwater school wanted
to tap into the students’ love of technology, and that it cost less do download a text than a
traditional book. And, moreover, not only are these devices capable of holding all of a
student’s text books, but each book can be kept up to date on a continuous basis.
Now, skeptics will claim that the kids will lose, destroy or sell the e-book. The article
tells what Clearwater has done to protect against that:
· Students are responsible for lost or stolen Kindles, the same as they are for paper
texts.
· Students can buy insurance to protect against damage of lost Kindles
· The school working with Amazon can track each Kindle and shut it down if it is
stolen, shows up at a Pawn shop or appears on e-bay.
The development and application of the e-book is comparable to the creation of the
Guttenberg printing press, and surely this is the beginning of the end of paper books as
we know them.
Our government and our media are finally beginning to focus on jobs and expect them to
return when the current recession ends, but they are wrong. Digital technology, as applied
to the e-book is eliminating traditional jobs faster than new ones can be created. Consider
the impact on jobs of the application of the e-book to the book publishing industry.
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Here is a list of jobs that will be eliminated:
· Harvesting trees for paper
· Gigantic mills that convert the trees first to pulp and then to paper. (These mills
are capable of producing paper at nearly a mile a minute)
· Ink manufacturers
· Printers to apply the ink to the paper
· Book binders to assemble the books
· Book Stores to display and sell the books
We are talking about the loss of thousands and thousands of jobs. And at the pace that
this technology is being commercialized by Amazon, and their competitors, these jobs are
likely to cease before the end of the decade. It is true that there will be some new jobs
such as those who convert the author’s work into digital form suitable for downloading
onto the e-books, and there will still be sellers of downloadable books and there will be
jobs to create and produce e-books that compete with the Kindle. The extreme of this
trend will be the author creating his or her own digital books for downloading onto the ebooks,
thus eliminating even the publisher.
The application of the new digital technology such as employed in the Kindle is as huge
and drastic as to make the industrial revolution of the nineteen century look like a walk in
the park. The last to catch on are our government and the media. These people, who are
predominately educated as journalists and lawyers have little if any knowledge how
capitalism and business work. Consequently, they have no experience such as Kodak
management has had when the digital camera destroyed their silver-based film business,
virtually overnight.
It behooves “we the people” to see that our representatives, who are after all “our
employees”, have practical experience so that they may possibly be able to understand
these new trends and be able to create sensible laws, regulations and educational
programs that are compatible with the free-market energies that are creating the trends.
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