URL: http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/kolu/2573/1.html
The Season of the Electronic Book
Michael H. Goldhaber 22.12.99
Deutsche Fassung
Are Books made of paper going to be a quaint object?
Suddenly, the e-book is arriving in many versions. Together they spell
a vast alteration in the relations between authors, readers,
publishers, bookstores, libraries and reviewers-the entire book
world-or simply the entire world. The book with paper pages as it has
been for several centuries may well be on its way to becoming a quaint
object, chiefly of antiquarian interest.
Download
One version of the new book is the Nuvomedia [External Link] Rocket
e-Book . It is a paperback-book-size- and-shape electronic device
weighing only about 600 grams, with easy-to-use buttons and LCD screen
that allow readers to read any one of about ten ordinary books that
can be downloaded into it. You have a choice of print size, and can
easily mark, annotate and search the text, and can find the meaning of
unfamiliar words in an included dictionary. You can take it anywhere,
read in bed, at the beach, on the subway, at breakfast, and so on.
Nuvomedia plans to have hundreds of newly published titles available
for down-loading for twenty dollars each. The Rocket e-book itself
will sell for 500 dollars at first.
Another version is a web company called [External Link] toExcel . You
can read as much as you want of any books it "publishes," online, for
free. Then, if you like, you can order any title to be printed and
bound and shipped to you on demand for about the cost of a normal
book, through a process that makes it economical rapidly to print just
one copy of any particular title at a time. For most purposes, I
think, this will turn out to be an intermediate step, on the way to
wider dissemination of e-books.
Until now, a manuscript had to appeal to a mass audience or it would
never be seen in print. Even exceptional niche and experimental
manuscripts were denied a market. At toExcel we believe every author
should have a voice ... to be able to publish without bowing to "what
sells" ... and to retain ownership and control over the work.
A third current effort is a program being produced by a company called
[External Link] Night Kitchen . This is supposed to be an
easy-to-use, cross-platform software for producing interactive
objects, from hypertexts to multimedia DVD-roms. In the long term,
this will have the most radical implications for the nature of the
book.
Because the e-book is no larger than a book, and weighs little more,
it answers many of the objections to books via computer. While even a
laptop is useless for many of the bodily positions in which we choose
to read, an e book isn't. Even if what seems essential about the book
is its feel in your hands, with an e-book you might be able to
approximate that by coating the device in paper, cloth or leather.
There will be drawbacks as well as advantages. You can pack one e-book
for your vacation and know you will not run out of reading matter -
unless the battery runs out, in which case you might find yourself
with no reading matter at all. Students will no longer have to lug
heavy book bags from home to school and back, but might also be in
trouble if their e-book batteries fail at a critical moment. A
scholar's or writer's study might be easier to dust than if filled
with books of the old kind, but the room might be much less cozy and
interesting to be in. The social mixing that goes on at bookstores may
become a thing of the past. If you want others to be impressed, with
the book you are reading or carrying around with you, the e book, once
its original novelty is over, will deny you that chance, forcing you
either to give up false modesty and proclaim your interests in your
own voice, or to give up any identity through your reading.
Of course, lovers of the traditional book need not fear an instant
loss. It will take some time before e-books and the like are
sufficiently perfected that a large part of the reading public finds
them irresistible. But whatever their current drawbacks, they are just
the harbingers of lighter, cheaper, faster-downloading, more flexible
electronic substitutes for the book. They will make it possible for
any author to publish without much extra effort and without the delays
and difficulties current publishers sometimes throw in the way.
Quite soon, for selected books, at least, readers will be spared the
wait of a couple of days that even ordering from Amazon.com now
entails. Each downloadable title will be available anywhere in the
world, at any time of day or night. If the $20 dollar price for
down-loading a book seems too steep for some readers, almost certainly
prices will come down sharply. No matter how you try to protect
copyrights, say by filling up your text with secret "watermarks," the
protections will be easy to overcome. Because text is completely
"digital" it is easy to rekey texts into the web on "pirate" sites or
to pass it rapidly via e-mail from friend to friend to friend. Thus,
publishers, to stay alive, will want to set prices low enough to deter
much piracy.
Authors who are expecting very small or very large readership will
equally have reason to bypass publishers. For those who can now
anticipate almost no royalties, why not publish for free so as to
maximize the attention the book will get? At the other extreme,
best-selling or famous authors can see to it that the full price that
is charged comes back to them directly, without their having to share
profits with the publishers and the publishers' shareholders.
What of editing, marketing, advertising, reviewing, and the like?
Reviewers, many with their own web sites, will, in effect be editors.
Books they like will get added attention. Readers can be editors too.
Authors will actually gain by publishing each version of their
manuscripts as soon as written, and they can then, if they like, get
feedback from their fans, just as easily as current authors can get it
from their friends and colleagues. Subsequent versions of the same
text, sometimes with different titles, could coexist online with
earlier versions, with the later ones benefitting from the editorial
advice of readers known and unknown. Such informal editors might well
take proprietorial pride in what they have helped create, becoming
'"reviewers" and "advertisers" of the finished books as well.
Will readers meet as they do now, face to face, in bookstores? Will
writers travel on book tours and give readings in those same
bookstores? Possibly not, but we can hope that new institutions will
replace what will be lost.
Should we worry about the evanescence of the digital media, and can we
do something about it? The first problem is that books that exist only
on servers might be erased, or disappear when the server is shut down.
New software might not be able to read books developed in older
versions. Throughout the short history of computers, dozens of coding
methods have lived very briefly, and much once encoded is now
unreadable. Will books suffer the same fate, specially if libraries
with books on their shelves begin to be outmoded? As long as a few
dozen copies of each book are printed out and stored in depositories
scattered around the globe, the contents of books should survive
pretty well. In addition, if online books do take over from the
printed kind, the coding (that is, methods of rendering text into
digits) involved will be so widely used it will be hard to change.
More problematic though will be the hybrid books. With Night Kitchen
and other new software, and with computer-like devices such as the
e-book, it will be possible to make multimedia version of books,
complete with sounds, animation and so on. Some of the software for
doing these more complex things will certainly be subject to revision,
and multimedia books might well be "unreadable" far too soon.
Meanwhile, as I shall discuss more in future, copyright may be in
peril, but ownership of the attention that now comes to authors won't
be. A more serious challenge comes from the combination of multimedia
and the capacity even of the first e-book to hold up to ten texts, a
capacity that will only increase. Furthermore, e-books combined with
cellular phone technology yield hyperlinked books.
In the past, the physical unity of the book added to whatever textual
coherence the author provided to encourage a full reading from cover
to cover, even if that reading might take months or even years,
interspersed with much else. You could put the book down and it would
stay there, continuing for ever to hood the same text.
Further, no matter how long and complex, the book in the past was both
orderly and finite. It was orderly in that it words, paragraphs
chapters and sentences followed one another, so that it could contain
a single narrative or an interlocked series of arguments. It was
finite in the sense that with enough patience and tenacity you could
read it all, and even come to know it intimately in its entirety. But
with a multimedia hyperlinked book, simply downloaded into the e-book
apparatus, neither of these attributes still need to hold. The author
is therefore more responsible than before to hold your interest, but
many ways to do that will offer a chance to detour, quite possibly
forever, on to others' thoughts.
Rather than reading a single book, we will simply find ourselves,
quite possibly, immersed in all books, or even all media, and never
able to do more than skim the surfaces in an arbitrary order. If in
the past our identity came, as much as anything from the books we had
read or not, our sense of self will now be unchained and unmoored.
_________________________________________________________________
Copyright © 1996-98 All Rights Reserved. Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Verlag Heinz Heise, Hannover
last modified: 22.12.98
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