When relatively recently the leader of Jarabe de Palo, Pau Dones, said the MP3 format was running with the CD, it is quite likely was unaware that he was confirming the words that had already sent Nicholas Negroponte in his 1995 book The World Digital. His vision of this new world, Negroponte claimed that to understand the advantages we bring the digital world must necessarily gleaned the atoms of the bits. However, I fear that Pau Dones had not read the book, so you should ignore what he meant with this separation Negroponte currently being produced, but it is simple to explain, so I'm ready to do so.

As pointed out by the author, so far most of the industry media and entertainment is based on the distribution of atoms. That is, their business model is based on the distribution and sale of newspapers, magazines, books or CDs that serve as support the transmission of information that consists, after all, in bits. When we buy a CD or DVD you are buying are actually bits, since the information contained in this medium is digital (ones and zeros), while atoms only serve us as a wrapper (the plastic which comprises the CD more the role of the booklet). As an endorsement, I will say that interpretations of what really is gained when you go to a store to buy a CD, are diverse. However, it tends to affirm that when we buy a CD just acquired the right to reproduce, so a CD is not entirely our though we paid 16 € for it. Obviously, this is another debate so we will put aside as not really in our interest in this article. In any case, the new digital world to which we went, it trades mainly with bits, so that the support as a source of trade tends to disappear or become residual as happened with the vinyl with the appearance of the compact disc.

But this vision that is only important content, leaving the continent, has not yet been accepted as a viable business model, so the new digital environment has generally regarded as a threat than an opportunity . Thus, from a first time, record companies have attempted to address the various tools that Internet users have created for the dissemination of peer-bit or Peer to Peer (P2P) networks using the Internet as a channel. These softwares have become one of the fundamental tools of the network and are those with greater aceptaciónentre the Internet, however the technology is problematic from the perspective of copyright since it tends to not respect them.

It is well known that the first tool that was created P2P gained some success was Napster that allowed in exchange digital music files from a network for free. The prosecution of the company and its closure did not mean the end to the use of such tools, but rather encouraged the development and improvement of new ones. Significantly, prior to the closure of Napster by the various lawsuits, makers of the P2P network began to filter the MP3 files being traded on their servers and they owned copyright, this only caused a shift of users to other tools such as Audiogalaxy using the same philosophy. This came to demonstrate that the use of P2P networks had been established within the network and the Internet did not want to stop using tools that enable them to download music from the Internet in a very comfortable while skirting the law.

Currently there are several exchange platforms P2P bit so the record companies strategy currently focuses amedentrar users of different softwares through individual complaints. Of course, this persecution has yielded somewhat like Dante claim a deceased person who had never owned a computer, or other minor complaints to download the music of the Network

But is it possible to download and listen to music on the Internet in a legal way? That is, bits can be traded? The answer is clearly yes, but we must pause to consider who owns this new business. It is interesting to note that the new distributors of music in the digital world are not the record, if not that much of the pie is shared by various technology companies (Apple, Microsoft, also recently debuted Yahoo!, But there are others like Terra). However, the final objective Apple or Microsoft is not necessarily the music business, but sales of digital products such as portable audio players MP3. This leads to the conclusion that the major studios should start worrying about the cake part in music on the Web before they themselves begin to want to artists releasing music by bits and not to distribute in the form of atoms. It is obvious that this does not necessarily need a label as an intermediary, need only request the assistance of a technology company like Apple to disseminate their work.

The phenomenon does not stop at music and phonograph records tablets as as expands the bandwidth of new possibilities open to internet users who wish to exchange bits. The film companies are discovering that their margins are eroding slowly on the Net precisely the same exchange in P2P networks. But in any case, it is still early to be undertaken to discover whether the same policy that the record in the digital world, although it appears that will follow suit.

Meanwhile Apple has already announced that is able to provide music videos to a television-like quality, so we should not be surprising if soon will jump further and begin to offer movies on demand. Can that Hollywood producers look and feel to struggle with your own customers, as did the record, however as a policy will prove completely wrong.

But stop now with the only medium that seems foreign, so far, the conflict of translation of bits and atoms: paper. The question that assails us now is: What will happen to the book?

It is curious that all printed materials are processed, stored and edited in a bit to the time of publication. The photographs, texts and graphics that can be used in a printed publication are bits at the time of its dissemination in which they become atoms. Find out why this is quite simple: Not yet devised a technology that could replace paper in terms of usability and ease of use.

The e-book exists, but is still a dream, a dream that is facing the problem of developing a device that is usable and easily marketable (Salable in short). Some publishers have ten years in the business of digital book, and although its evolution is not spectacular, the takeoff is imminent. And when you finally do, nothing will be as we knew him.

Of course, the possibilities offered by the e-books preempt other non-book formats such as newspapers and magazines. By then the media should begin to consider policies on the Net more successful than those that have been developed. Surely no one will want to read the newspapers on the computer, they are downloaded and read (although you can go further as we shall see) the files on your reading device (the ebook) and keep them there with Miguel Leon Tolstoy Delibes. When you feel that you are useful not just delete them or move to another mass storage device, its true digital library.