| Chapter 1: | Digital Media Defined |
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Digital technologies were adopted quickly in the creation and production of books. Computers and computerization helped immensely in the book publishing sector, reducing costs, speeding writing and editing, and facilitating the design and manufacture of books. E-commerce applications followed quickly behind, with companies such as Amazon.com leading the way in using the Internet to sell books, in a modern variation of catalog shopping. The development of e-readers—Japan’s Sony products were among the first to find a commercial market and were popular in Japan before the Kindle, Kobo, and Nook readers reached North America—increased the integration of publishing and digital technologies. The advent of the mobile Internet and even smaller handheld devices, with Japan’s DoCoMo taking the lead,6 created an industry out of writing books for use on mobile phones (and the most popular making the transition back into print!). The development of tablets pushed the publishing industry even more aggressively into the digital space: Apple’s IPad and Research in Motion’s Playbook, Kobo’s Vox, and Amazon’s Fire compete with a variety of Asian-produced tablets (Samsung Galaxy was one of the first, and the Acer Iconia Tablet and Fujitsu and Lenovo’s impressive tablet lineups joined the fray in 2011). The advent of digital books challenged the existing book retailing sector while providing expanded and very different technological foundations for authors, creators, and publishers.7
The transition from the tool makers to the tool users is one of the most important twenty-first-century aspects of the digital revolution. Technology remains important, and the digital industries are dominated by the rapid obsolescence of existing technologies and the promise of faster, cheaper, smaller (bigger and thinner in the case of digital televisions), better, and more innovative. At the same time, the underutilized potential of existing consumer and business electronics and digital delivery systems creates enormous and inexpensive space for digital content makers. Video games, for example, outstrip conventional moviemaking in economic importance.8 The digital economy created by multiplayer games, the commercialization of YouTube and Facebook, and virtual-reality services such as Second Life has become a force to be reckoned with, just as these