Andrea Ballatore and Simone Natale write whatever is the opposite of an obituary for the old-fashioned, print book. The piece was occasioned by the news that ebook sales among the UK's top-five booksellers actually fell in 2015. This news, the authors suggest, show that predictions that print books were doomed by the rise of the e-book were hype.
Scott earlier talked about simplistic notions of firsts in technology. When was the first computer invented? Depends on what you mean by computer! Anyway, who says the arrival of computers was marked by the invention of any given machine?
Yesterday, Apple revealed that its newest iPhone (model 7) will not include a headphone jack. Executives gave a number of reasons for the move. Phil Schiller, senior vice president for marketing at Apple, said that the jack took up a lot of space in a device that Apple is determined to shrink.
A recent edition of The Economist has two articles that make mention of drones. Semi-autonomous vehicles will certainly change things. But, will they change everything that their promoters claim?
A post a few weeks ago featured some obsolete technology that's
making a comeback. This time I want to talk about how obsolete
technologies often surprise people at their longevity.
The New York Times reports that Funai Electric of Japan will cease production of its VHS VCR lines this August. After that, there will be no more producers of this venerable technology.
VCRs were first produced in the mid-1950s and cost $50,000 each! The first consumer versions were marketed in the 1960s but serious household use got underway in the mid-1970s with the so-called Betamax-VHS format war.