Jason Epstein Quotes

Electronic books are junk.

Yes, the world is now flat for publishing as well.

I make a good living selling hardback books through paper publishers, and I have many friends in the industry who will suffer as it changes, so on a personal level, the transition to digital isn't something I welcome wholeheartedly.

I won't even try to predict the specifics, but I think the ebook - as a medium - could be a game-changer.

E-books, which made their debut in the 1990s, cut costs even more for both consumer and producer, though as the Internet expanded, those roles became confused.

To compare books to computers, I mean, computers are the way to get books. That is the medium for distributing text because it doesn't require paper.

People ask me what my predictions are for publishing and how digital is changing things and I tell them my only real prediction is that is it's all changing. Amazon, Google and all of those things probably aren't the enemy. The enemy right now is simply refusing to understand that the world is changing.

The book is here to stay. What we're doing is symbolic of the peaceful coexistence of the book and the computer.

Look at the world of books nowadays. People just download books. They don't go to a bookstore. Amazon is wiping out Borders and Barnes and Noble. Those are brilliant examples of ephemeralization doing more with less at a better price.

I think we did a great job of putting together a program that would have made good e-books available had people been buying e-books in any real numbers.

Sooner rather than later, any other form other than digital media will be a thing of the past. It won't vanish, but let's face it, this is seemingly the way of the future.

There's no more film; now everything's digital. I welcome this. It's fantastic for me to have a new chance.

I think, because of the Internet, we're not looking at the very, very narrow channels for distribution that there used to be.

Luckily for both the tech industry and Hollywood, there is only one thing that counts - use of the Internet is still growing exponentially, as consumers shift to digital everything from analog.

Soon it's all going to be digital anyway. It's all going to be saved on a little coin somewhere.

Technology has changed the way book publishing works, as it has changed everything else in the world of media.

Everyone seems to think that digital technology devoids the medium of content, but that is not true at all. If anything, it broadens the content.

There's a difference between being able to make long distance phone calls cheaper on the Internet and walking around Riyadh with a PDA where you can have all of Google in your pocket. It's a difference in degree that's so enormous it becomes a difference in kind.

We do live in this age of new media.

With a 100-year perspective, the real value of the personal computer is not spreadsheets, word processors or even desktop publishing. It's the Web.

Reading for me will be a combination of books, magazines, Tumblr and just kind of the Web in general on the iPad.

We cannot escape that Hollywood is in the middle of a wave of technological change. The current angst over all the implications of new entertainment technology is nothing new.

Newspapers are busily experimenting with different models. Traditionally, and I suspect in hindsight very mistakenly, online news was free. And once given free access readers felt it was their entitlement.

As I like to say, the entire collective memory of the species - that means all known and recorded information - is going to be just a few keystrokes away in a matter of years.

Digital is a different world because you are sitting at home and a hi tech piece of equipment today is within reach of most people, so they are watching a pretty hi tech version of whatever you've done.