Catching Up to the Past

John Siracusa on e-books:

Overall, there’s definitely an “all of this has happened before” vibe, perhaps even with a hint of “all of this will happen again,” if I’m feeling pessimistic. It’s almost as if those first attempts to get the e-book market off the ground never happened.

On a more personal level, it’s like Peanut Press never happened, which partially explains the defiance and resentment with which I began this article. For those of us who were ground up in the unforgiving gears of the market during that first, hopeful go at getting e-books into the hands of the masses, seeing it all unfold again, in much the same way, and with no apparent understanding of the past, is bittersweet at best. It’s not so much that we’re morbidly dwelling on what might have been, but rather, we’re disappointed that so few have learned from our mistakes. After all, you have to be aware of history before you can learn from it.

This particular quote resonated with me in terms of content management systems. The best CMS I ever worked on was the custom solution we built for boston.com. It’s still running today, almost 8 years later, and the systems I’ve been working on lately still have a long way to go to reach that level of features and flexibility.