The impact of the digital era on the future of books

The organic consumption of the cyberspace has generated a number of transformations on our readers, regardless of place: South America, Europe or the United States. The hybrid texture of the Internet has been silently altering society in terms of the recorded music industry, editorial content delivery, media enterprises, and telecommunications. Some examples are: the Universities of Stanford and Michigan directed part of their collection of 7.4 million books to Google Books; The New York Public Library handed over to Google material not protected by copyright laws. Brazil is not different in this respect. Senac Publishing House made a partnership with the "Google Program for Book Research" and 660 books in their catalogue are being digitized and will be available free of charge online from Google. Starting with a key word, the user can see and read four pages of the selected works. Following the same trend, Contexto Publishing House, as part of its 20th anniversary celebrations to take place in 2007, has just inaugurated a special information service area on its site. It is available only to registered readers, and they will have access to special articles, complimentary chapters of books already published and sound files that add content to the written material. Besides, Contexto has also established a partnership with Google. As an author, I have just agreed to send some chapters of my book Jornalismo Digital (Digital Journalism) to Google, and have offered a new chapter in PDF (written in September 2006) of my book Jornalismo Digital to be downloaded free by readers in the Contexto site (www.editoracontexto.com.br). Chapter IV, named "The Leaving Behind of the Classical Theories of Journalism" tries to map the receiver of information content, a human being who has grown up playing videogames and interacting with the electronic world. They can for example, easily consume their share of this enormous amount of text, images, sound, and video that pollute and sometimes impair reading. In addition, they were trained little by little to find--just like relational database software--what they need on the Internet. This individual as a "receiver" does not show any trouble reading a book in PDF, that is to say, they have no conflict in relation to the digital format. An idea of this new Brazilian reader is provided by research with the title of "Dossi~ Universo Jovem" (Report on the Youth World), carried out by MTVBrasil. 1 On the average, they are 23 years old; 50% of them study, and 57% work; 6% belong to the upper class, while 36% belong to the B social group and 58% to the C social group. It is noted that 23% of these young people are married, and/or live with a partner, although this number drops to 7% in the A social group. The higher the economic status, the smaller the chance is of falling for the charm of the matrimonial ceremony. The research also shows that