Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward - Trying to live a life out of the comfort zone

The second interesting point of my conversation with Andy was related to the feedback to my post about the history of Officenet and Passion for Entrepreneurship. The majority of the comments said they thought it would be a good idea that I write a book. And we started discussing to what extent the blogs are a “better alternative” to books.

I believe in a few years when we tell our children that the things we wrote were printed on paper in a way they could no longer be modified and were distributed in a way no feedback or interaction between the author and the reader was possible it will sound totally ridiculous.

At the same time, the length and conceptual complexity of a book does not seem achievable with the current structure of a blog.

We both agreed we believe the book WILL die. But its replacement still did not completely emerge yet. It is not the Kindle. that simply gets rid of paper but does not change the impossibility to edit and the lack of interactivity. Neither is the blog and its long succession of short posts.

Lastly, a final dilemma. Musicians can survive with the end of the intellectual rights of music. Because even if they likely will have to end up all as Radiohead, giving music for free, they can make money making live appearances and selling merchandising, things that cannot be “pirated”. But if this future way of publishing does the same with writing the writers do not have similar alternative sources of income.

Will we end up simply writing books and publishing them wholly online, taking the good of each alternative? Will that mark a further step towards the end of intellectual rights for writers?

Photo: PaPeR.cLiP