But that’s the “I can drink at home, why go to a bar? I can eat at home, why go to a restaurant?” mentality. Women (and some men) have been shopping for entertainment and as a social activity for a very long time. They don’t shop because they need to buy something. They buy something because they are out shopping.
There may be fewer stores, but even tactile displays aren’t going to keep you from going out shopping.
Are you sure that’s missing the boat? It strikes me that “in store pickup” might be the worst of both worlds for a brick and click. You have all the expenses of a physical store, but you have to compete on prices with Amazon.
Nowadays, with internet-enabled cell phones, you’d get people coming into the shop, finding what they want, then ordering it on their phone before bringing it to the register.
That’s a business decision, not a technical limitation. And while getting higher sound quality IS important to me, so is not wasting space in my apartment and creating industrial waste to be disposed of.
But if I am going to worry about fidelity, then I’ll go with vinyl.
And the problem with this would be?
I’ve done pickup at Best Buys. I get the Internet ordering advantage, I know the thing is at the store without driving there, there are no shipping charges, and I can see the thing before picking it up to make sure it is right. Plus I get it that day.
In populated areas I can see the opening of centers which would be shared by several on-line companies which would allow you to pick up the more popular items immediately and the less popular ones maybe a day or two later. It would be kind of like the fast food places in New York where several fast food franchise share one storefront.
Some online stores already offer views from different angles, and different close ups. Tactile displays will only approximate the feel of merchandise, though. I’ve tried virtual models, and I’ve been very unhappy with them. I’m short and fat, and when I input my height and weight (five feet nothing, and none of your business), the virtual model not only doesn’t look like me, it doesn’t look like ANY woman I’ve ever seen. I can deal with the model not really looking like me in the face, but it DOES need to accurately represent my figure, lumps and all. I think that I’d have to have a laser measurement, or something similar, for my figure. A virtual model also won’t tell me if the garment is cut to suit my figure. For instance, my daughter has broad shoulders, so broad, in fact, that she bought a men’s trenchcoat last week because a women’s trenchcoat simply wouldn’t fit her unless she got one that was five sizes too big everywhere except the shoulders. There’s no way that she could have used a virtual model to check the fit, unless each style of garment had notations about how it fitted each part of the body. I buy clothes online…but I usually buy muumuus, and even then I choose the ones without set-in sleeves, preferring flutter sleeves, raglan sleeves, or some other style which is very forgiving.
Even if I had a Kindle, I wouldn’t want to have it on my kitchen counter and try to execute a complicated cookbook recipe from it. And I like my large-format cookbook food porn. Some books I am happy to buy online, but I like to have cookbooks (or, say, foreign language dictionaries and other reference books, or anything with a lot of photos or other art) in my hand first.
I think you are suffering from failure of imagination. We’re talking 50 years in the future here. Perhaps there will be a consortium of clothing manufacturers who will support laser measurement centers in the pick-up malls. If they exist today to make movies, they will be cheap as hell in 20 years.
Another reason to shop on-line - the ability to order something made to fit you exactly. 25 years ago when I was doing manufacturing stuff there was a lot of talk about how automation would allow lot sizes of one. Well, Dell’s business model is exactly lot sizes of one, and lots of factories build to purchase order, not build for inventory. I suspect that you will be able to submit your measurements and have a dress or whatever constructed for your measurements rather than finding the one on the rack closest to what you would really want.
MP3 downloads can be considered an example of lot size one - you build the albums you want, not the ones the artists and record companies want you to have. I read about an ATM-like print -on -demand kiosk the other day, for printing books in lot size one. It will be great. I’m a pretty normal size, though apparently thin for my height these days, but even I find my selection limited when I buy pants. I can imagine how someone who is more of an outlier must feel.
I’ve seen multiple views of products also, but they are still rather limited, and are usually front and back but not underneath or inside. We’ve got a long way to go on this.
From a New Yorker article on e-book readers it seems that they do a terrible job with illustrations. However, in 50 years we might have decent e-paper in various sizes, which won’t be so limiting.
Eh, Kindle is cool, but I can’t see the market for “cheap thing you throw in the bottom of your beach bag, to get scratched by sand and have sunblock spilled on it and ignore for weeks at a time” is something that is going away 100%. A book is something that never needs electricity and is very hard to damage beyond use (like the time my copy of Les Mis got left out in a rainstorm… swelled to twice its size (!) but it was still good for what I bought it for.) That makes it an awfully useful sort of thing.
Maybe when you can pick up an ebook reader for such a cheap price you could completely ignore the possibility of damaging it (say… $7-$35, depending on options 
) then I might say that the book has been replaced.
The “virtual model” business is an interesting idea. Understandably it sucks now, but I can see it working in the future. However, you wouldn’t use it to try on clothes before you bought them. I think rather the clothes could be sewn to your exact dimensions.
(This doesn’t seem far-fetched. A designer shirt with frills, etc, would start in two pieces with all of the frills already attached, and then a CNC machine would sew them up according to your lines. That’s just modern tech. In the “future” you can perhaps make the whole shirt, full customized, from scratch.)
They’ll cost about that in ten years. The book is a dinosaur, it’s on its way out as everything but a novelty market.
Your frame of time-scale is apparently a lot shorter than I am. What I am saying is that the book will die with you. As long as you exist to prop up its existence there will be a market, but it’s gone when you’re gone, and they’ll be increasingly difficult to find as you grow old.
And what I am saying is that one of the reasons books still exist is that they offer certain utility that ebook readers cannot confer. In other words, it is not “propping up” books but using them in way an ebook cannot be used.
WHEN ebook readers overcome that and achieve the same utility of the book, and add all the utility of a reader, then you will be right, books will become a niche product rather than the standard (kind of like keeping a horse is today, an expensive pastime for the hobbyist, not a means of getting around everywhere).
Maybe that will happen in 40 years, who knows. I just thought your post signified that books are already completely without any utility (other than nostalgia value) over ebook readers, which is not at all true.
I still might not want it to get covered in olive oil or chocolate syrup or whatever.
I do hope you’re wrong - I don’t hold truck with digital only. If there is no hardcopy, there is no purchase. So when they stop selling CDs I won’t have new music, when they stop selling DVDs I won’t have new movies, and when they finally stop selling books I won’t have new things to read. And that will be a little sad.
I don’t think so. I’m a voracious reader of science fiction and fantasy. I’m also a voracious reader, period, and I remember all the predictions in Popular Mechanics and similar magazines in the 50s and 60s (Daddy saved his back issues, and when I was learning to read, those were some of the things I read). I still remember all the predictions that were solemnly trotted out, that we’d have flying cars, be living on the Moon and have colonies on Venus and Mars, etc., in the “near future”, by which they meant the 1970s or 80s. Certainly, they expected to see these things happen before the turn of the millenium. Today, we don’t have anything close to flying cars for the average person, and our space program is an embarrassment. We’d need a good long running start just to get back on the Moon. We do have videophones, sort of, in cellphones and webcams.
Oh, we COULD have had flying cars and colonies on the Moon and Mars today, if we’d done the research and put forth the effort. It’s possible. But that’s not what enough people really want. For that matter, I’m sure that we could actually have laser fitted, custom made clothing today, or in a very few years. But again, it’s not what most people want. For many women and some men, shopping isn’t just about buying things, it’s a social activity as well, something to do with friends. Going to the mall isn’t about shopping, but about examining things for sale, and part of that experience includes handling the merchandise. Going to the hardware store is about getting excited about all the things that you can make with the various items for sale. I’ve already mentioned that I enjoy browsing book stores. When I go to Amazon, yes, I get a lot of recommendations, and some are good and some are completely off the wall. But it’s not the same as going to a bookstore, browsing, inhaling that bookstore smell, and talking to other customers there. I enjoy shopping for books both in person and online, and the two experiences have different pleasures. I don’t consider online shopping a substitute for all of my meatspace shopping, it’s an addition to the meatspace shopping.
What we are capable of doing, and what we actually will do, are two completely different things. If you’re saying that we could have this available in the future, then yes, I agree with you. In fact, I think that we could easily have this available within a few months, if someone wanted to invest in it. I don’t think that it’s as likely as you think it is, though. I, personally, would LOVE to go to a website, upload my measurements and requirements, and then pick out the various design factors on my next several purchases (more pockets, dammit, put more pockets on it! more pocketsessessss!), and specify my fabric, color, and solid/print requirements. In fact, I know of a couple of sites that do this already, but they produce the garments one at a time, and really aren’t set up to make a great many garments at once. These places are really just custom tailors who’ve set up their shops online.
For the record, I’m 52. How old are you?
Because some of us don’t own iPods yet?
I buy treebooks because I don’t have $300 to spend on a device required to make the e-books readable. Shocking, I know, but I can barely afford food these days, you seriously think I’m going to spend money on an e-reader? (As it is - I’m getting my treebooks from the library these days).
And I’ve got 5500 SF books and magazines, including a complete set of Galaxy and an almost complete set of F&SF (and Analog/Astounding almost complete starting at 1947.)The difference between the stuff I talked about and flying cars (I spent a lot of time at the Futurama exhibit in the 1964 Worlds Fair) is that my stuff scales. Mechanical stuff does not. I think 3d displays and laser imaging systems scale also.
I agree about the social aspects of shopping, and mentioned that 50 years from now there will be malls where this will be what draws people in - kind of like people go to bookstores to drink coffee and to be around books. I suspect the imaging systems will start at stores. The point of lot size one is that you integrate the kind of customization that you want into a mass manufacturing environment, just like Dell does.
Don’t knock the on-line experience. My wife hates to shop for clothes, so she’d love to buy on-line. Lots of people don’t have easy access to good stores, but are stuck with the crap in WalMart. They’d be good candidates. I could see Amazon partnering with some clothing manufacturer/store to do this - think of how it would attack WalMart. You’d probably, at first, have a place to go to look at the clothes, but think of the reduced inventory to allow someone to order clothes for pickup or home delivery without having to have the distribution of sizes/colors in the stores now. This would also be good for those of us who are style-averse. I’ve even bought underwear on-line because I don’t like 90% of what is available in stores these days. People 50 years from now are not going to understand how we lived only being able to choose from that handful of shirts in the color/size we want on the rack at Macy’s.
So, we will do away with the dark, satanic. malls and have either cheap on-line shopping or almost as cheap but still efficient shopping for fun. But still no flying cars, and no more videophones than we have today.
A Kindle or an iPhone costs $300. In 2009. What’s the price point going to be in 2019, or 2029? $100? $50? $10?
I can imagine a point where readers of this sort are given away for free as a way to entice customers to buy more content, just like cell phones are given away to entice people to enter service contracts.
And there will be all sorts of display sizes–nano size, phone size, tablet/kindle size, laptop size, and so on, and you’ll be able to get your content on any type of display. So you toss your $30 tablet display into your beach bag, and it can display all your books, watch your movies and shows, play all your music, get you to the interweb, and so on. Or if the tablet’s too big, you use your phone. And when you get back to your hotel room, your phone can use the hotel room’s display to play or display anything your phone can access.
And while your phone will have a stupendous amount of memory compared to today, it won’t have to save your entire library of movies and music and books, because what it can store is just an authentication code that tells the content provider’s servers that you’ve paid for the content, and they can stream it to you.
The days of people thinking they need to archive a copy of every movie they watch or every book they read or every song they listen to are coming to an end.
And this stuff is going to get cheaper and cheaper, because the marginal cost for streaming one more copy of “Ghostbusters 2029” is near zero.
At some point, all digital content except time sensitive information is going to be essentially free, at least to the end user, just like TV and radio is free. How creators will be compensated is not clear, but it certainly won’t be by paying $14 for the right to watch a particular movie as many times as you like, or $5 for the right to watch it once.
If everything is free for the streaming to the end user, there’s no point in keeping archives of everything on your own hard drive. Take Youtube–if you have a favorite Youtube video, do you download it to your hard drive so you can watch it whenever you like? No, you just go to Youtube and stream it when you want to show it again. If you have a favorite web page you probably don’t download the webpage for posterity, you just go back there.
So the future of digital media is any content ever created, available anywhere, on any display, in any format, all at no additional cost to the end user.
I’m going to have to disagree with this on principle. This is a myth that has been propagated to the point where everyone accepts it as axiomatic.
While individual components and features and technology will certainly follow the “everything gets cheaper” curve, the finished product does not. Manufacturers and designers instead work from a price point and keep packing more / newer / faster / bigger / more-powerful into the overall product to maintain the price point. Rarely do they maintain a market for the old technology at a drastically lower price.
So, the overall impact on the consumer is not that everything gets cheaper - it stays the same price, or gets more expensive.
Actually your scenario contains the seeds of the solution to the payment problem. With ubiquitous high speed web access, which seems plausible in 50 years, everything you stream can be tagged with a node-locked license, tied to one or perhaps several players. You purchase eternal access to a movie or song. Those who wish to provide open source access to their content can make the license free to anyone. Expensive EDA software uses a similar licensing scheme. Alternatively, you can use a license server which allows you to check out one copy of a song or movie. This lets you lend it, but you can’t watch it while someone else can. You can store the content on your private player, but it doesn’t work unless you communicate with the license server. This would have to be built into the hardware to make it harder to hack, but that is easy enough.
The reason content will never be free is that though it costs nothing to stream Ghostbusters 2029, it costs a lot to make it. Even virtual actors won’t change this - video games cost a lot to create even with no actors usually. Even when they have voice actors, I doubt it is a significant percentage of development costs.