Exhibition floor, Online Information 2008
If there was a dominant theme out on the floor of this year’s
Online Information 2008 show at Olympia, it had to be the continuing rise of e-books. I conducted a brief survey of opinions from the stands and, even discounting for the tendency of suppliers to talk up their own market, it was an optimistic view that emerged.
The last year has seen barriers to adoption both financial and attitudinal subside. New tools coming into the marketplace have dramatically reduced the cost of producing e-books. Apprehensions about issues such as back-file access – if you cancel a subscription where does the e-book go? – have noticeably dwindled, according to Ebsco’s John Reid.
So which are the sectors that are adopting fastest?
This post is fundamentally a response to a really interesting one by Dave Kellogg that I read a few weeks ago titled positioning MarkLogic Server, so to get the most of out of it you’re going to have to check Dave’s out first. The diagram on the left, a variant on Dave’s original, shows how different types of data and content technologies square up. While I liked Dave’s analysis, I also felt there was something missing that I wanted to tease out here, so I’ve made a few modifications.
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