The Contemporary Nomad is where five authors talk with you, dear reader, about the important subjects of the day. Whatever we decide they might be. Read more 
W I G N A L L
Those were the words on the front of that fictional e-book prototype, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and I think it’s a pretty good message for people looking with trepidation at the emergence of Kindle and other e-book readers.
I haven’t bought one yet (notice the “yet” – I’m sure I will in time). I know Steve Mosby has one, though I haven’t had chance to ask him what he thinks of it. I also know that my agent has one, and that she uploads manuscripts onto it so that she can read them away from the office. I know another person who plans to buy one so that she doesn’t have to carry twenty novels every time she goes on holiday. So, I can see them catching on, but is this the end of the book as we know it? Well, the answer to that is yes and no.
The amazing application value of the e-book reader is in non-fiction, or more specifically, in factual, reference and text books. I can imagine that within ten years (perhaps sooner), students will not use text books – why bother when you can have all your text books in an easily searchable format on one device? I also think e-readers will develop rapidly to maximise that form of use, including visual and video elements, updating automatically, and linking to relevant additional material on the web.
By the same token, and proving the prescience of Douglas Adams, I think e-book readers will revolutionize the travel guide sector, particularly as the e-readers develop more functions, and the line between them and hand-held wireless PCs blurs. When Adams was writing, the idea of a single hand-held device that contained all the known information about the galaxy was a flight of fancy – yet things are advancing so quickly now that, rather than being impressed, we’re all given to wondering what’s taking them so long to develop the next generation of software.
All of this, of course, is why I don’t think the e-reader will ever be more than a niche market for fiction or narrative non-fiction. It’s not so much the business about the emotional attachment we have to books, or the fact that the book is a thing of beauty, it’s more a question of built-in obsolescence. At the moment, an e-reader allows you to read the text of a novel, but driven by the requirements for other types of books, as suggested above, the e-readers will develop new and more advanced applications. At that point, just “reading” a book from beginning to end on an e-reader is going to seem dull, rather like a computer that isn’t connected to the net. People will quickly start testing the narrative limits of the new technology and new hybrid forms of story-telling will develop, which may or may not catch on. But once we go down that route, the e-book will no longer be a book, it will be something else, and people who want to engage in the leisurely, internal narrative of the traditional story will have to… read a book.
So, I think the emergence of the e-reader is hugely positive and will allow for all sorts of developments in the way we read – and carry – information. They may well morph into handheld PCs within a few years, and they will certainly lead to new ways of sharing information and telling stories. But I don’t see the book disappearing from the shelves just yet – do you?
November 17th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
I see e-readers as becoming another format, like mass-market and trade paperbacks, hardcovers, and coffee table books. Between Kindle (and everything that will inevitably follow) and Cappucino presses, publishing contracts will have to account for the permanence of a master ecopy. And inevitably, you will have a group of writers who will fight like mad to stop these changes as a threat to “the way things ought to be.”
November 17th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
One of my books is on Kindle. It’s doing rather well. I don’t know what to make of this yet and whether to like it or not. I emphatically do not like google books publishing huge chunks of my novels.
As for the future: you’ve summed it up well, Kevin. Nothing is stable in the electronics business. Built-in obsolence guarantees continued sales of new equipment. The printed book has a very long life.
November 17th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Ooh – I could go on all night about this. But just to sum up…
I’ve got an Iliad and, while it’s expensive, I like the hardware a lot. It’s when you connect it to the computer that the problems start. The whole e-book scene still has a bit of a ‘wild west’ feel to it. No standard format. Strict but variable DRM. Different books available in different countries. Patchy catalogues. And the Iliad itself feels very ‘beta’: the supposedly official software I’ve downloaded for it will recognise it, but not let me name it, so I can’t get firmware updates; the instruction manual is on it, so you can’t refer to the instructions as you follow them. I could go on…
Reading books on it is nice, but I’m not confident about the future: I just can’t see a standard format triumphing, because there isn’t the consumer or publisher pressure or interest. It’s going to remain scatter-gun. Say that people were pirating e-books on a massive scale – they’d have to be made to take off. But at the moment there’s little incentive for investment in either camp. Piracy would do genuine wonders.
I agree totally about narrative experiments. There are some books (Geoff Ryman’s “253″ springs to mind) that are ideally suited to the medium, and surely more will follow. ‘Choose your own adventure’ books, which I’ve often thought you could do interesting ‘serious’ stuff with, would work well.
Reference books, though … I’m not sure. I agree: a perfect fit (though some tech improvements for diagrams, etc, are needed to make them equally practical). But University set texts have a captive audience, and so, again, there’s no real incentive, especially when your relatively small core audience is the one most likely to pirate.
And travel guides … well, again, I agree. But then, my basic Ipod Touch can access the web from any wi-fi spot, giving me maps, info, weather, directions, useful websites, everything, and all for free.
I actually got an Iliad because I loved Hitchhiker’s Guide so much as a kid, but my Ipod is closer to delivering the goods on that right now.
(Sorry for the length of this btw).
November 17th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
There hasn’t been a one-thing that has kick started the e-book, not even Oprah’s big thumbs up a few weeks ago. But something will. There will be an ITunes moment. On my blog I got a lot of hits when I mentioned the South African crime novel (for e-book) with built in sound track.
http://aroundrobin.blogspot.com/2008/11/singalonga-e-book-first-crime-novel.html
[The article has a link to Vicky Barnsley's LSE talk on the future of publlsihing that's worth a read]
One big thing will be the same issue as is now endemic in newspapers: the revenue issue. Why publish 3000 copies in hardback at – say $20 – when you can let a novel be downloaded for $7 to be read on an e-reader. New fiction, and – even more juicily for publishers – out of copyright fiction with a smart introduction – are obvious “content” for the e-book. So is everything academic.
The big moment will be the Apple I-Book, I suspect. The question is when will Apple sign up the publishers in the same way as ITunes took the music business?
November 18th, 2008 at 4:02 am
One of the things that intrigues me about e-books is that no one knows what you are reading on them. With a book, everyone on the train or bus can see what you are reading and judge your taste. Kindle means no need to explain to your snobby neighbor that you are reading TWILIGHT because your niece has been gushing about it. You could read the most lurid pulps or bodice-ripper romance without anyone being the wiser. Also, you can load academic paper pdfs into a Kindle. Are you reading the latest white paper on the financial situation in Iceland or 2666.
Yeah, I ride a snob bus heavy on the New York Times notable books.
November 19th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
As a student with a science only schedule, the idea of carrying only a kindle or other edevice rather than all the heavy-ass texts I now lug is very tempting.
However, my texts have lots of pretty diagrams and photos that would be lost on a digital screen-the detail just wouldn’t be there. Detail that we really need.
So for some purposes, no, I don’t think books will go away. In any case, my eyes go wonky if I read a screen for too long…