Reading the future

Rosemary Sorensen April 11, 2009
Article from: The Australian

WHEN the first really influential wave of the e-book revolution hits Australia -- and estimates run at that being in a year to 18 months -- it will be the novelty value of a new gadget that will give it impetus.
For people who love to run their thumbs over a small screen, scrolling through text and images, adding sound, changing colours, switching sources, the e-book may fill up so much space on the mental shelf marked "reading" that there will be little room left for conventional books.
If Australia's experience with the mobile phone is any guide, the take-up rate will be swift, though it is taking a long time for any reasonably priced form of e-book reading device to make it to this country.

Some people make the case for the mobile phone becoming the device of choice for downloading everything, including books. Others claim the dedicated reading device will soon be so attractive and versatile it will be as common as iPods. Everyone is guessing or, as Random House's marketing director Brett Osmond puts it, "no one knows what the future will be", but the evidence is mounting -- in sales -- that the electronic format is appealing to more and more readers. The stakes are high and exceed mere economic considerations. There are those who believe the fabric of humanism, the great ideology woven out of Enlightenment thinking, will be rent deep if technology makes the bookobsolete.

According to Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, what we need to consider goes far beyond convenient gadgets. If we replace print with screen-based text, "we will not simply have replaced one delivery system with another", Birkerts wrote recently in US magazine The Atlantic. "We will also have modified our imagination of history, our understanding of the causal and associative relationships of ideas and their creators."

Just so, says New York-based Bob Stein, who was in Brisbane recently to speak at the Ideas Festival and to give his blessing to the Brisbane Writers Centre to set up a branch of his Institute for the Future of the Book. But that, for this radical publisher, will be a good thing. "If you think about the book as an object made of printed pages, there is no future for the book, and it's an uninteresting discussion," Stein says.
"What's more interesting is to try to understand what role a book plays in our lives. I'm evolving my definition, but the middle definition, which dates from when I started the institute five years ago, was that the book is a vehicle humans use to move ideas around time and space. In all these conversations about the book, what makes it difficult to talk about what's coming is to get over people's attachment to what was. One of the hardest things is separating out the nostalgia."

Stein confesses he is an impatient reader but nevertheless says he has some sympathy for those who are appalled at the premise that the book, in its present printed form, is doomed. He compares the book as a form with architecture that is no longer possible to build.
"I love gothic churches and I'm sorry we don't build them any more, but we don't," he says. "They've served their function and so has the 800-page novel. It was really cool, the novel, and I've spent a lot of time curled up with good ones, but new technologies give rise to new forms. Humans were not born with a gene that made us gravitate to print."
Stein's position, even among those who are keen to see how electronic technology will change publishing and reading, is extreme.

According to Osmond, the novel or other form of text, as we know it, will not change but the way we read it will expand to include electronic technologies. "There is a school of thought that e-books may actually create more demand for the paper version," Osmond says. "In the future you may simply buy the book and you are able to read it in a range of formats. You might begin with the paper version, then take a chapter on your e-reader while you're walking the dog or pick it up on your computer. We are aware, because of the news coming out of the (US), that there is a market waiting."

Every Australian publisher is dabbling, more or less, in the e-book market, but even Allen & Unwin, which is perhaps the most advanced in its preparation for what everyone knows is coming, is forced to watch and wait for crucial developments to unfold.
"Formats for e-books will be determined on an international level, at least for the English language world," Allen & Unwin publisher Elizabeth Weiss says. "There's very little point in trying to establish a local standard for Australia. Whatever we do here needs to be connected to the international e-book market."

At the moment, if you were interested in downloading a book instead of buying a paper version, you would probably have to purchase a PDF file, which would come to you like a long cumbersome text file, possible to read only by the most dedicated and tolerant. Hand-held reading devices are available here, but they are very expensive. Osmond is trying out a $1000 reader he says he doesn't dare to take outside in case he damages it, which, of course, destroys the portability function and makes e-books appear ridiculously precious alongside paperbacks.

Read the full, thought-provoking article at The Australian online.