I’m a big booster of e-books. Not that I have anything against traditional printed books, but I think the publishing industry needs to be revitalized and reconceived.
These days, publishing is in a slump. I don’t mean just an economic slump, although that’s certainly part of it; the nationwide bookstore chain Borders recently announced they are looking for a buyer after posting disappointing revenues.
But the real slump is creative. There used to be 20 or more major publishers, but because of mergers, acquisitions, and bankruptcies, the number is now down to only five or six. All of them are located in Manhattan, within a short drive of each other. Editors move freely from one company to another. A trend at one company quickly becomes a trend everywhere. (How many ripoffs of The Da Vinci Code have we seen? And how much vampire porn can people read?) There is a kind of groupthink that stifles new ideas and shuts out books that might appeal to parts of the reading public unknown to New York intellectuals.
What’s needed is to diversify the publishing business, to open the door to newcomers, to encourage new voices and new perspectives; and e-books (along with print-on-demand books) may be a way of doing this.
If they ever catch on.
So far they haven’t. A small coterie of aficionados sing the praises of e-books, but the vast majority of readers want nothing to do with them. This is a shame, because in many ways e-books offer all the advantages of traditional books and plenty of new options besides.
Years ago I bought the Rocketbook, one of the earliest digital reading devices. It was a rather bulky gadget, but ergonomically designed and comfortable to hold. The screen was backlit and easy to read in dim light, but tended to get washed out in bright light. The Rocketbook had definite potential, but unfortunately its manufacturer, Nuvomedia, sold out to Gemstar, the company that owns TV Guide. Gemstar proceeded to run the Rocketbook into the ground, removing most of the free online content available for the device, setting up an online bookstore that carried only bestsellers, and coming out with a new version of the reader that had fewer capabilities yet managed to be more expensive. In short order the Rocketbook was defunct. However, an enterprising outfit called eBookwise bought up the unsold Rocketbook readers in Gemstar’s warehouse, made some modifications, and started selling them as eBookwise readers. I guess they’re doing pretty well, since they’re still in business today.
The future, however, does not lie with backlit LCD screens. The new thing is digital ink, which simulates the look of a printed book and can be read in direct sunlight. Several new readers feature this technology, but the two most prominent ones, at least in the United States, are the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader.
Of the two, the Kindle, although aesthetically unappealing, seems to be more user-friendly. And it’s linked to a huge selection of proprietary content on Amazon.com. Looking for a new reading device, I took a close look at the Kindle and I was definitely interested — until I learned that the rollout of the device proved so popular that the existing units have already sold out; the product is now back-ordered.
Since I didn’t feel like waiting a year or more for my device, I went with the Sony Reader instead. Aesthetically, the Sony is a big improvement over the Kindle. It does not have quite as many features, but on the other hand it’s also not saddled with an ugly keyboard and a weird trapezoidal shape. Proprietary content is available at the Sony eBook Store, which offers about 20,000 titles. Some users complain that the site will lock up on them, but I haven’t had this problem. I do admit that the site is not well designed for browsing. Actually, you’re better off going to a brick-and-mortar bookstore, or to Amazon.com, and making a list of books that interest you; then go to the Sony site and see if those titles are available.
The Sony is lightweight, about 10 ounces, and comes with a nice softcover binder that protects the unit and gives it something of the feel of a regular book. You can adjust the font size, within limits, and you can display grayscale pictures and play MP3 audio files. The main advantages of the reader, of course, are that you can download a book and start reading it instantly, and you can store a large number of books on the device. If you’re traveling, you don’t have to choose between three or four books; you can take them all. In fact you could take a hundred books or more, if you were so inclined. You can also download non-proprietary content off the Internet and read it on your Sony, in most cases with the help of third-party conversion freeware. Text, RTF, HTML, DOC, and LIT files are among the formats that can be converted. Given the huge number of free public-domain books available at Project Gutenberg and similar sources, there is an endless amount of material to choose from.
Will e-books ever catch on in a big way? I’m heartened by Amazon’s decision to aggressively push the Kindle, and by the early success of that device. But it’s too soon to tell if the public at large is ready for the next generation of reading. I suspect that most people will not give e-books a try until the reading devices are inexpensive enough to qualify as impulse purchases. Prices of the digital books themselves also need to come down; Amazon has taken a big step in this direction by lowering the prices of its most popular Kindle books to only $9.99, but many of their other books – and most of the Sony titles – are only slightly cheaper than their print counterparts. This is foolish; e-books, unlike printed books, have virtually no production, storage, or distribution costs, and their price should be adjusted accordingly.
One thing’s for sure: as long as publishing continues to plod along with antiquated and inefficient 19th-century technology, there will be fewer books and fewer people who read them. The revolution can’t come soon enough.