Over a decade on into the full onslaught of internet delivered digital media, books can seem a bit of an old fashioned way to access new ideas. Even so – when people need to delve deeply they still need books, so their arrival and sales can be useful datapoints for hype cycle watchers.
For example, the first books on AJAX came out about October 2005 and Don Tapscott’s ‘Wikinomics’ came out December 06. These are relatively recent examples of key milestones in the evolution of technology concepts that will one day be adopted by many if not all corporations. Business and professional textbooks contain recipes for corporate cooks. A concept can almost mark its true birth around the first formally published books. They crystallize the idea and indeed often provide the first accepted naming and surrounding terms for the innovation. Luckily for those researching Hype Cycles nowadays, we are in the AA (after Amazon) era. In the many years before Amazon the simple question ‘is there a book on this?’ could take hours or days to answer. Today – if you can’t find references to a named innovation with an Amazon book search, it tells you something important. That the innovation (if not trivial) is still at a very early stage in its evolution and probably only suitable for aggressive Type A companies. Without a book there is no collection of case study material, frameworks, methods, tutorial and other transferable learning. So adoption will be limited to the brave innovators not the followers.
