Out of print?
By Mark Broatch - Sunday Star Times
11/04/2010

Photo right: Lawrence Smith
Slippery slope? Mark Broatch chances his luck with a Sony Reader PRS-505.

PERHAPS IT was just an absent-minded moment but it demonstrated how easily and swiftly even the most trenchantly loyal reader of books – me, say – might be lured into switching to their electronic equivalent.
My brief was to read an electronic book everywhere you'd read a typical dog-eared airport thriller – in bed, on public transport, in broad sunlight, on the loo – and report back whether paper has a future.
I was there, in the bathroom, scribbling in pencil in my trusty paper-based notebook, and I turned back to the ebook to read the next page and, rather than click the little semi-circular button, I tried to physically turn the page with my finger. My brain had glitched just for a second and forgot that the words had not been printed in ink on to the bleached pulp of trees but magically recreated on a screen driven by a computer chip.
It was an early reminder to me that a love of books might simply be a love of reading with added fetish and ritual, a little like what keeps smokers smoking beyond the hit of nicotine. But there was a serious problem with the assignment: there are no ereaders in New Zealand. None. No iPads yet, no Sony Readers, no Amazon Kindles. Or at least not officially.

There are, of course, iPhones and iPod Touches you can read books on, and you can buy the gadgets when overseas – Australia, for instance, has Kindles and Readers – otherwise we must wait until the manufacturers deign to deliver their devices here. Luckily, several local book publishers use ereaders to juggle their esheafs of emanuscripts, and Hachette were kind enough to lend us a Sony Reader PRS-505 for a week to ebrowse. So I would be able read bits of a new Harlan Coben thriller, a forthcoming Jim Powell and Alan Furst, or Jonathan Tropper's latest, This is Where I Leave You. Game on.

FOR SOMEONE who spends most of his waking hours reading – at work I would read 40,000 words on the page each week and at least the same again electronically before I even pick up a book – a device that may let me get through my perpetual stack of books anywhere holds some appeal. The latest devices, like the iPad and the Kindle, with their wide colour touch-screens and their ability – once you've signed the accompanying telecoms deal – to wirelessly download the latest newspapers and mags, and run games and music (see box), hold much more.
The full piece at the Sunday Star Times.

Footnote:
The Sunday Star Times does us proud with it book review coverage. Three full pages on books in yesterday's issue. They always carry the bestsellers for the previous week too which I find most interesting.
These figures are supplied to them on a subscription basis by Nielsen BookScan from data provided by a large panel of booksellers.
Interesting to note that in the Top Ten NZ Fiction list, six of the titles are from the recently released NZ Popular Penguins series.The four titles in the top ten that are not from the Penguin series are Inheritance by Jenny Patrick, The 10PM Question by Kate de Goldi, Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones and Lola by Elizabeth Smither. The two top titles are published by Random House and the other eight all by Penguin Books.