I love books and I buy them by the armful. I would far rather spend an afternoon browsing around a bookshop than shopping for clothes. Than shopping for anything come to think of it. And I rarely if ever leave a bookshop without a book. At home I have far too many books. They’re all over the house. The pile by my bedside is nearly as tall as I am, and there are books in wardrobes, drawers, boxes and on surfaces everywhere. One of these days I am going to get loads more built in bookshelves, enough to fit all my treasures and I will spend hours happily arranging them. I will delight in the smell and feel of my books and smile as I find old friends. I will get sidetracked, sit on the floor and leaf through a particular favourite. (There’s a grin spreading across my face even as I contemplate this guilty pleasure.
So yes, I’m a bookaholic. I’m addicted not just to the words, but to the whole tactile package and I’m not really the target market for some recent developments in the field of book digitisation.
Sony’s new e-book reader will soon be available in its new improved version, and the company is to launch a site similar to Apple’s I-tunes which will allow readers to purchase and download books. It plans to start with around 50 000 titles. Google also has plans to enter the e-book download market. And Plastic Logic, a small technology company, has just built a plant in Germany where it will produce plastic e-paper, durable enough to be read ‘on the go’ and onto which content can be downloaded wirelessly. All very exciting stuff!
As a writer, and an insatiable consumer of words, I welcome any technology which helps bridge the gap between writer and reader, but I inevitably have some reservations.
The writer part of me wonders how copyright will be protected once books are available to download. What’s to stop me passing my copy along to all my friends once I’ve downloaded it? With the click of a mouse, a book could be forwarded onto literally millions of people by e-mail. But hopefully the publishers will have learnt from the music industry and there will be inbuilt controls before the whole thing goes live.
I also refuse to believe that the paper book will become obsolete.
Up to now the biggest impact of digitisation on the publishing worlds has been Print-on-Demand, the facility whereby single copies or small runs of a book can be printed as needed from a digital version. To me this has merely served as proof of our undying love of the printed book. We get all this new fancy digital technology and what do we do with it? We use it to get our hands on more printed books. Out of print books, self-published books, books which might not attract a mainstream publisher because they are not ‘commercial’ enough.
I felt fairly safe in my conviction that not only would the ‘real’ book survive, but the new-fangled book-on-a-screen would never take off. Not in a big way, not to real people, reading for pleasure, to fill their leisure time. I decided it would be restricted to geeks and its main use would be for textbooks and reference texts where the ability to search digital content comes into its own.
But recently I have been forced to revise my opinion. A few things forced my re-think.
The first was simply misplacing my glasses one day. Instead of turning the house upside down, I adjusted the text size on my laptop to read my e-mails. Hmmm, it would be handy to be able to do that with a novel wouldn’t it? And what about the new luggage restrictions, raising the cost of bringing ten or fifteen books (no exaggeration) on a fortnight’s holiday? I couldn't survive without my books, but maybe digital guide-books would reduce the load.
But perhaps most convincingly, and for me worryingly because I never want to say goodbye to the book: What about the environment?? Paper production, printing and book distribution are all energy consuming processes and contribute to global warming. Inks are chemicals, which not only use up valuable petroleum resources, they also potentially pollute in their production. In a brave new publishing world, the e-book will impact less on the planet.
Will I stop buying books? I don’t think so… But I might be willing to give the e-book reader a fair chance when it comes out.
Oh, and I’ll go and switch off a few lights.
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