The colleges and universities around the country must begin to take media studies much more seriously as an emerging discipline, more on the level of electrical engineering than of journalism or communications.
I say this because we are coming upon yet another odd crossroad of media distribution, the ebook. The recent Microsoft and Barnes & Noble deal, which I think has changed the game, has created a market that will become a great mess unless some standards begin to rule the arena.
Right now, ebook readers are like the VCRs that struggled to compete among various platforms. If you were around during this battle, you know it was not about Beta versus VHS. It was Beta versus VHS versus some awkward Magnavox systems, a small format from Technicolor, and the Sanyo V-cord, as well as other incompatible formats.
Format wars also took place with floppy disks and all sorts of spin-offs and false starts. If you've ever worked in broadcasting, you know the number of formats and standards in video recording as it transitioned from quad-head tape to competing helical scan systems to digital formats is too many to count. The amount of raw content that will be lost forever because of the broadcasting format wars is untold, but it will be significant.
This also happened is with tape backup for computer systems. I have tapes and formats with backed up information that will never be retrieved. It's a miracle I didn't lose half of it.
So, now we have this same mess with ebooks. There are numerous formats from the ever-changing PDF to EPUB, Kindle, Daisy, DjVu, Archos, BbeB, eReader, iBook, IEC62448, and more still.
As far as I know, there is no universal converter and the standards are up for grabs. This is the biggest mess I have ever witnessed in all my years following technology.
I'm reminded, for some reason, of all the pre-1995 CD-ROMS that I have. Almost none of them can be played. Those that can be played will play incorrectly. I even had the great 15,000-page McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology on CD. I believe I bought it for hundreds of dollars. It's dead now, useless on a modern computer. What was the point?
Of course, much of this compliant is the basic gripe about dead media forms. If modern history needs to be backed up on usable media in the future because we are not carving information into stone tablets anymore, at what point do we begin to lose information?
In fact, this has been ongoing since the first item of information was stored on a punched card and became part of a deck.
I do not have any solutions to this dilemma, but I do hope to keep pointing it out as a problem so to at least spread some awareness of the fragility of modern stored information. In the meantime, if nothing else, can the academic institutions begin to develop an understanding of what's going on before it's too late?
You can Follow John C. Dvorak on Twitter @therealdvorak.
More John C. Dvorak:
• A Modest Proposal for Media Studies
• Why IPTV is the Future
• The Ubuntu Android Phone/Computer
• Microsoft Befriends B&N's Nook
• CISPA Bill Quickly Passes in the House
• more
Go off-topic with John C. Dvorak.
