Cussedness

Digital Books

Julia Bell doesn’t like the idea of electronic book readers. She’s being silly.

The real nub of the issue for me is that screens will now mediate the text. The bound book comes to us with so many connotations of magic and learning, so it will be a cultural revolution of Caxtonian proportions to watch it replaced by a bland black tablet.

Undoubtedly there were hordes of scribes fulminating similar rubbish in the 15th century about all those newfangled printed bibles. The parallel doesn’t hold, though; electronic readers are not a development of similar magnitude to the invention of the printing press. It’s more like the idea of using page-numbers, or the discovery of a better method of book-binding; it’s a small incremental improvement in existing reading technology, not a revolutionary, epoch-defining technological thunderbolt. Incidentally, Bell has clearly suffered no lasting ill effects in adopting the true modern-day equivalents of the printing press: personal computing and the internet.

Sony’s reader is not a new invention, as Bell seems to think. Electronic readers have been around for years, and they’ve never really taken off, probably because they’re such restricted devices. They only do one thing, when every other gadget out there is trying to be a sort of silicon-based Swiss army knife, and no normal consumer is going to shell out for a reader when they could sign up for a decent PDA-phone on contract and thereby get similar functionality with the added benefits of being able to play music, watch video, answer email, take notes, edit spreadsheets, play games, oh, and make phone calls too.

She says she can see ebook readers being forced upon us whether we like them or not. That won’t happen, the publishing industry won’t allow it. Authors will be worried about having their work pirated, publishing houses will be positively vibrating with terror over the same issue and the distribution and sales sector would lean very heavily indeed on the supply side to stop any binary-book shenanigans, because if we all went digital they’d all go bust.

Her parallel with the music industry’s move to digital sales is flawed, too. Music has been sold in many different formats since the invention of recorded sound, with each format rapidly superseded by a newer and generally better solution. The same does not hold for books, which have remained basically unchanged for hundreds of years, because they are brilliantly adapted to their purpose; there will have to be further technological developments to make electronic reading more attractive before it really starts to supplant paper books in the mainstream.

I can agree with Bell on one thing: I love books. I have thousands of them. I have paid extra for fancy copies of classic works I love, and I enjoy the physical experience of turning the pages, watching my gradual progress through a tome. I have even bought copies of textbooks that are available cheaper or for free online because owning the hard copy makes it easier to study the material. Paper books are great, and I’ll happily pay for them to help support the writers I like. But digital books have a lot going for them too. For the past three years I’ve been using a PDA to read digital texts alongside my paper-based reading. It’s brilliant, here’s why:

1. You can read in the dark without disturbing anyone. I’m a bit of an insomniac, and I love reading under the covers, falling asleep halfway through Dracula or a Sherlock Holmes story I’ve read twenty times.
2. You can carry the complete works of Dickens, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare around with you without needing a shopping trolley and still have room for the equivalent of a small record collection on the memory card.
3. You can bookmark and make marginal notes without messing up a book or having to fold page corners down or faff about with bits of paper.
4. You can read unlimited quantities of classic literature from Project Gutenberg for free (after making a donation to help out, of course).
5. You can feel smug because digital copies are far more environmentally friendly. No trees die in the manufacture of an ebook, and it could even be argued that those unused trees even soak up the tiny amounts of extra carbon dioxide that come from getting the text onto your chosen device.
6. You can, if you get bored of the book you’re reading, skip to something else with a couple of clicks, or just play a game of patience instead, and it’s trivially easy to return to where you left off later.
7. You can choose the font and print size of the text to suit your eyesight and preference, and you can even get the reader to move the text forward automatically so you don’t need to do anything to turn the page.

Since I acquired it I have read megabytes of great literature on my PDA, much of which I would not have bothered tracking down in real book form, and some of which is out of print and hard to find. I’m happy to admit that whilst it’s a great little device, it’s not a perfect solution for reading on, but then neither is a book. Both formats have their points and both have their drawbacks. Personally, I’m happy to take advantage of both while I can, because in combination I can read far more good stuff than I could if I stuck to just one or the other.

2 comments • 2007-01-24 13:11 • Categories: Books, Geek Stuff • Tags: E-Books, Ebooks, Gadgets, Idiots, Luddites, Technology