“Don’t worry,” some of my colleagues confidently tell me. “We’ll never give up our books.” And yet while e-books aren’t quite the everyday piece of technology that our mobile phones and laptops have become, they’re slowly starting to filter into the edges of the consumer landscape.

Old books.
[Image © copyright Photos.com]

In the US, for example, Amazon released its popular Kindle electronic book almost two years ago (and it’s still only available there). It’s been so popular that it’s been backordered ever since. Perhaps most importantly, the company was able to garner endorsements from die-hard book traditionalists: Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, for example. Though the company won’t report details about its sales, various estimates peg the number of Kindles sold at around a quarter of a million. The fact that Amazon offers over 200,000 book titles for the device and free wireless access to its site over a proprietary mobile data network may have something to do with its initial success. Just this week, in fact, Amazon has announced a new version of the device. As is often the case with new iterations of technology gadgets, it is thinner, lighter, faster, and has a better screen and longer battery life than its predecessor.

The promise of the e-book is so tempting: it can hold several hundred titles in a package that, at 300 grams, is lighter and more convenient to carry than the average paperback title. Imagine an entire library in your briefcase or rucksack, and the ability to quickly and easily download a new title whenever you want it. What about for students? The notion of putting all the reading materials that a student might need for a course onto a single device is tempting for me as a teacher.

No worries about further expensive books, or problems with distribution of materials. And for a student, it could be a single easy-to-carry volume with all the study materials they might need. Finally, the economics of an electronic book are hard to dispute: they’re cheaper to produce and distribute, and they use far fewer resources to put the content into users’ hands.

But the Kindle, and other e-book technologies like the iLiad, which is growing in popularity in Continental Europe as a platform for newspaper subscriptions, have yet to match the tactile and visual joy of a traditional book. I never have to charge a book, or worry about its files getting corrupted. Even when I rest a cup of tea on the pages of a book, the resulting brown rings end up making it comforting and familiar, rather than the cause for a trip to the helpdesk.

the economics of an electronic book are hard to dispute: they’re cheaper to produce and distribute

And as the ever growing world of digital media struggles with rights issues, e-book devices have to take care of those rights too. Rights notwithstanding, I get a tremendous amount of joy from loaning a well-read book to a friend to enjoy. How can I do that with an e-book? What about libraries? Can we have e-book libraries? If not, how can we imagine life without that fantastic system of the collective acquisition of books for sharing knowledge with our communities?

Unlike some of my colleagues, I’m fairly certain that these issues will be negotiated and that e-books will come into the mainstream relatively soon. In a generation, I expect that e-books will become the norm, especially in education. But books, that 400-year-old technology that we have grown to love, and that often have pride of place in our homes, will not become redundant relics of years gone by. On the contrary: like many other technologies have shown, books will co-exist with their e-counterparts, and we will have the best of both worlds!

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Gabriel Reedy is a lecturer in learning and teaching innovation in The Open University Business School. His research focuses on the social and cultural impacts of teaching and learning technologies, and he studies how technology can support professional learning.

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I’ve shopped online for well over a decade now, and it’s the first place I go to find out the best deals. So like millions of people every day, I’ll do something that was unthinkable fifteen years ago: I’ll go online to shop.

But in the last few years, the refinement of price comparison sites has added a new dimension to going online. In a few clicks, and in one easy-to-read tabular view, we can easily find out the best price for almost any product or service that’s offered for sale on the net. Want to find the cheapest price for that camera? Or what about that holiday? Shopping for a new power company? Which one will be the cheapest… just click and see. Even that one-stop favourite Google has a built-in price comparison engine now.

Online shopping trolley.
[Image © copyright, Photos.com]

Price comparison sites tap into one of our most basic human instincts: the thrill of the hunt. The feelings generated when shopping tap into these primal human urges. After all, it’s an intellectual and emotional challenge to chase out the prey, even if that prey is only a camera or a juice machine.

Maybe it’s just me, or maybe I’m too close to my primal urges, but sometimes I wonder if price comparison sites just make the whole thing a bit too easy. As my family from the American south might say, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Or is it?

The seemingly infinite amounts of information available on the net means that there’s no way we could work through all of the data needed to make sense of it and make the right decision. So the reason it seems so easy is that computers are taking over something our brain is used to doing.

Information processing theory is one way that cognitive psychologists have developed to explain how people make sense of the world around them. Our brains are roughly analogous to a computer, this perspective goes, and the computer takes in data from all of our senses and does the things computers do to data: puts like things in categories, analyses relationships between data points, chunks it into pieces, and discards what it can’t make sense of.

If you’ve ever gotten a bit of sensory overload when confronted with a somewhat crazy scene, you’ll have experienced one aspect that these psychologists are talking about.

price comparison sites have tried to replicate some of the social aspects of buying

And of course, though price is usually what people think of when they start shopping, there are other things to consider when buying. A lot of price comparison sites have tried to replicate some of the social aspects of buying by allowing users to rate the merchants in the transaction. That way, you can learn from other people’s experiences without having to replicate them yourself.

On the high street, you wouldn’t walk into a shop that looked derelict; but on the net, anyone can put up a nice looking website. With ratings easily visible on the price comparison rankings, you can see whether a good price also represents a good value purchase—as there’s no doubt you’d want to avoid a place that charges exorbitant shipping fees, takes ages to fulfill your order, or is difficult to work with.

So all told, price comparison sites can give you the best of the net by processing tremendous amounts of information for you. Perhaps most importantly, though, they allow you to use your superior human intelligence to focus on the things that really matter. Things like what the difference is between an “Online Only” and a “Web Plus” tariff from your power company. Unfortunately, even the best computers can’t figure that one out.

Listen to this blog post on our Money & Management podcast.

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There’s no doubt that it was a heady and exciting time. The Seattle area, where we lived, was home to some of the most impressive names in technology. There was Aldus (later Adobe), who revolutionized desktop publishing; Real Technologies, who created one of the first platforms for streaming audio content; Amazon, who turned the relatively new Web into a marketplace; and hundreds of others.

Bill Gates.
[image © copyright BBC]

As a young university graduate in the mid 1990s, I began to hear rumblings about how the Internet, which at that time was still very limited in scope, was changing everything. And the west coast was the place to be. Fortunately, I had family in the Seattle area, so I packed my bags and, like generations of Americans before me, headed west.

Within days I had a job with a large software company at twice what I was making on the east coast, and within a few months I realized the reality of high-tech work in Seattle: sooner or later, almost everyone ends up working for Bill Gates. The company couldn’t grow fast enough and soaked up every talented body that came to town – from computer programmers and math geeks just out of university; to English graduates like me and many of my technical writer and editor colleagues; to people like my flatmate, who had dropped out of seminary on a summer field trip to Seattle and parlayed his technical abilities into a well-paying job formatting and producing technical manuals at Microsoft.

"known by his email alias (as was almost everyone at Microsoft), billg was always present and active in the company"

The culture of the company was exciting and new at the time, even if it has now become something of a cliché. We worked hard and it was an exciting intellectual challenge, and late nights and weekend work were common. Holidays – just two weeks per year – had to be taken around the cycle of product releases, and when things went into “ship mode,” usually about four to six months prior to releasing a product, everything in your personal life went on hold. But at the end of the cycle, once the product was released, the company always sponsored a massive party. Sometimes lasting over a few days, they consisted of everything from bouncy castles and a barbecue in the car park to weekend ski trips to Canada.

Known by his email alias (as was almost everyone at Microsoft), billg was always present and active in the company, even as it grew to upwards of 20,000 employees, and it was common to see him around campus. Occasionally, I saw him doing that same cross-lake commute, just like many of his employees. Tough and demanding, he was passionate about the company he created, and he wanted nothing less from all of us who worked for him.

In return, the perks of working for the company were second to none. The health insurance, which is a must in the US, was gold plated; the stock option grants made millionaires of thousands of early employees. Set carefully in stands of evergreens, almost every office in the campus looks out onto the beautiful scenery. And every building featured the necessities: a coffee stand and a café open from early in the morning until late in the evening, so you never need leave the campus (or your work).

When I started working at Microsoft, I was just 25 years old and the Internet revolution was just getting underway. I remember thinking, naive though it was, that it might just be the pinnacle of my working career – it may be the last place I worked. But as I sat with colleagues in the Redwest café one sunny summer afternoon, eating lunch under a section of the Berlin wall (part of the company’s permanent collection of art and historical artifacts), looking out over the evergreens to the stunning snow-capped Cascade mountains, and discussing a new feature for one of the world’s most popular software products…well, maybe I could be forgiven for getting caught up in the moment.

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The programme raised some interesting issues about the potential benefits and drawbacks of social networking sites like Facebook. There's no doubt that information and communication technologies have changed the way that people connect with their friends and loved ones. Many of my friends and family live in North America, and it makes a huge difference to be able to keep in touch with them almost instantly with the click of a mouse. But these technologies are also beginning to change how we conceive of our relationships. Someone you've met once only briefly at a party probably wouldn't traditionally be called a "friend." So it seems that as these sites make it easier to keep in touch with each other, they also have begun to expand our social spheres. I have a hard time keeping up with my relatively small group of friends. How can anyone really keep up relationships with a hundred, or two hundred, or sixteen hundred?

"companies like Facebook will want more and more information about us"

It's brilliant that these sites are often free for users to register on and to use. But just because we don't pay a subscription fee doesn't mean there's no cost to those of us who use them. After all, it costs the company a lot of money to buy the massive computer servers and Internet bandwidth that these sites use, and to pay the people who write the software code and who feed the octopus and starfish in the virtual aquarium. As Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg explained, quite simply, these sites are based on a business model of selling targeted advertisements. Targeted advertisements, unlike traditional broadcast adverts, rely on information about their targets. And we--the users--are the targets. It's inevitable that companies like Facebook will want to gather more and more information about us as users, because it is that rich mine of data about us that advertisers are willing to pay for.

Information that people make available to the public on sites like Facebook can be used in strange and unintended ways. The recent tragic death of British exchange student Meredith Kercher provides one chilling example. When Meredith’s roommate Amanda Knox became a suspect in the case, her Facebook profile provided a wealth of information for the media. Her photos on MySpace and Facebook, and her online details (including her nickname of “Foxy Knoxy”) were published by news organisations around the world. Suddenly her youthful, party-girl persona, no doubt only intended to be shared with her friends, became her primary public image. Meanwhile, people from all over the world posted messages of grief and sadness on Meredith’s public Facebook page, which became a sort of online memorial.

A few people I know have already experienced what one of my friends calls “faceache”—they’ve just given up on Facebook because it takes too much time and energy. But I suspect that, whatever happens to Facebook itself, online social networking sites will continue to grow. These sites make it easy and convenient to keep in touch with our social circles in a fast-paced and busy world. So it seems inevitable that, one day soon, I’ll be on Facebook too. If you happen to see me there, give me a poke!

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About the author

Gabriel Reedy is a lecturer in learning and teaching innovation in The Open University Business School. His research focuses on the social and cultural impacts of teaching and learning technologies, and he studies how technology can support professional learning.

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