This is an interesting story by Tim Bajarin on pcmag.com about the rise of a creative class, enabled by the emergence of tablets and e-books: Tablets, e-Books, and the Rise of a New Creative (Writing) Class.
Today I did some research for my previous posts and I was reading Jeff Jarvis’ What Would Google Do. I chuckled reading the chapter “the link changes everything” because a paper book is notoriously bad in providing web links. But wait, I was reading the book on my pc, having downloaded Kindle software – which made the absence of links even more painful.
If tablets and e-books really break through, people will no longer “just” write a book, but will have to decide which multimedia-elements to include. Bajarin:
Conventional wisdom has it that the publishing industry will benefit the most from this re-invention of the book, but while this may be true, the advent of such technologies may also lead to the emergence of a new creative class.
He refers to what happened when Apple created the Software Development Toolkit (SDK) for the iPhone:
At last count, 100,000 apps have been developed for the iPhone, the majority of which were not designed by professional developers. Big name game developers like Electronic Arts and ngmoco did embrace the SDK to create professional looking games, but most of the titles for the iPhone actually come from one or two person shops.
Maybe among those developers there are some academics developing educational games, or journalists news related applications. Whoever those people are, I think they can indeed be considered as being part of the “new creative class”, and tablets and e-books will offer huge opportunities.
Roland Legrand