TechCrunch is quoting Nicholas Negroponte as saying the physical book is dead in 5 years.
The physical book is dead, according to Negroponte. He said he realizes that’s going to be hard for a lot of people to accept. But you just have to think about film and music. In the 1980s, the writing was on the wall that physical film was going to die, even though companies like Kodak were in denial. He then asked people to think about their youth with music. It was all physical then. Now everything has changed.
The crisis earlier this year was prompted when a Greenpeace video highlighted Nestlé’s use of palm oil grown on former rainforest land in South-East Asia and linked the iconic Kit-Kat with the deaths of orangutans, which are an endangered species. Nestlé sought to ban the video and successfully removed it from YouTube, though not Vimeo. The Nestlé Facebook page was inundated with protests and criticism as a result.
The Nestlé page has 109,502 fans but many of them seem to have joined in order to leave critical comments about issues such as palm oil or baby formula, such as the ones below. Nestlé is such a consumer-facing company that it’s probably right not to retreat from social media – but I can’t say I envy the poor PR flacks who have to run this page.
