Though I must confess my ignorance here as I have no clue whatsoever as to who this Winer person is, or who's Scoble for that matter, so I'm not quite sure who it is that I'm defending, but I guess I'm defending the principle.
Though I must confess my ignorance here as I have no clue whatsoever as to who this Winer person is, or who's Scoble for that matter, so I'm not quite sure who it is that I'm defending, but I guess I'm defending the principle.
The latter position will almost certainly lead you down a path of ruin as you try to make your living with technology.
If you worked for a book publisher who couldn't even conceive that people might like ebooks, couldn't fathom why anyone would ever want to read a book on a digital screen, for any reason, you'd quit (I hope).
Not someone who thinks paper books are superior because of the way they feel, or that they don't have DRM, or that you can share them, lend them, resell them, collect them. Those are valid reasons to prefer paper books.
But if you work in the book industry, and honestly can't understand why anybody would ever want an ebook, you're not someone whose opinion about the nature of the book industry I value.
As to who these people are, Dave Winer is a technologist who played a very important roll in making RSS a thing (and he wants to make sure you remember it...for all of eternity), and Robert Scoble is a technoloblogger (he writes about a lot of services/apps from a user perspective) who never met a social networking site/iPhone app/ that let him promote that he didn't like.
I see :) And about the "can't even conceive" bit, well, I think he's just saying that. That's what idealists do sometimes.