FollowBlackstone Audio’s business philosophy raises a major concern with me, not just about their company but about similar businesses. There is a large range of people in the United States from those who have the most modern technologies and those who not only have little or no computer based technology but are also barely educated and barely literate. Most people in the publishing market struggle to understand that those who are in the front seat of e-publishing and digital technologies are a minority in the United States. E-publishing is in an anachronistic space where we’re attempting to perfect digital literature (i.e. hdread.com) when only a small portion of Americans have the capability to access and own those technologies.
Class rooms are the perfect example, every child should have a tablet PC, which is in the $300-$800 range, and be taught how to use it, but it isn’t a realistic demand in any sense. Some publishing companies, like Blackstone, must be assuming that changing the market to all digital will force parents and consumers to make the investment to have the right technology, but it will take many generations to isolate the distribution of the written word to the cloud. I don’t disagree with companies for wanting to be at the peak of digital publishing capabilities, I’m disappointed as an educator that there is so little support of most companies in taking action to bridge the gap between the barely literature population, a good portion who do not even own desktop PC’s, and the technology that is threatening to make literature and published works even less accessible.
