We are probably about to move to a world without bookstores and indeed a world with fewer books.
Last week Sony announced “Librie”, an electronic book reader. It is the size of a book and it has a paper-like screen described by reviewers as “amazing”. The paper-like screen avoids the obvious difficulty of reading the printed word on a LCD screen – that it hurts the eyes.
“Librie” can store 400 or more books and you can download from a library of 50,000.
When you combine this technology with Google’s plan to scan in millions of books from major university libraries and put all the out-of-copyright ones on line, it makes you question whether the paper version of books will have much of a future.
Hitherto, the paper book and paper newspaper had the distinct advantage of readability. Sustained electronic reading is a poor option. Also, the LCD screen attached to a laptop is too heavy and does not have enough battery life.
Now the disadvantages appear to be falling on the paper side. Why lug half a dozen books around when you can take an electronic “Librie” the size of one book? Further, the electronic version allows for searching so you can go back quickly to some critical part of a book. And on the publishing side, why print thousands of copies of a book that might never be sold?
Initially authors have been aghast at these developments. Google originally said it was going to scan every book, even those in copyright. It abandoned that after author uproar, but it has still not given up on the idea.
But authors should welcome the new technology, particularly new authors. In a way, it cuts out the middleman, or at least the printing part of the middleman’s task.
With paper new authors have a difficult task. The publisher bears the large risk of the cost of printing. If a book is a lemon, the publisher is out of pocket. So publishers are not going to take risks with new authors very often – better to stick with the profitable policy of more of the same.
Readers are the poorer for it.
Readers also bear much of the cost of the wasteful old paper technology and some is borne by established authors. Big publishing companies pass the costs of unsold copies on to purchasers and authors of more successful titles, through higher prices and lower royalties.
Even the sold books are wasteful. The hard-done-by author who does nearly all the work gets a mere eight, 10 or 12 per cent of money that a reader is prepared to pay for the experience of reading a book. If you cut out the wasteful printing process, authors should get a higher portion.
Moreover, books cost a lot to transport and take up a huge amount of space in some houses.
I know books have an exquisite feel and looking along a bookshelf – especially someone else’s – is a terrific experience. It tells you something about the owner. Indeed, you can tell the subjects someone did at university by the books on their shelf: Pol Sci II, Eng Lit III, Psych 101 etc.
But the same could be said about vinyl records and the CDs which are about to join them in the garbage can of history, along with paper photographs and the photo labs which produced them.
I still think this will be some off because the Sony product is not all beer and skittles. In typical big-corporation manner, Sony has tried to keep the profits up by giving the electronic books a 60 day shelf life (pardon the pun). After that they drop out of the machine and you have to pay for another upload.
But the fundamental barrier – overcoming the strain of screen-reading – appears to have been overcome.
Does this mean that any idiot can write and publish a “book”. I suspect not. The publishing houses – like newspaper editorial departments – have a huge amount to offer even in a totally electronic environment.
They give a stamp of approval to an author’s work. They edit it. They announce to the world that this is good stuff amid all of the free sludge that is available electronically. In short, they advertise the author and then rely on word of mouth.
Further, in a new world of electronic books, publishers are likely to accept paid advertisements for other goods to be placed in the book.. Advertisements in the middle of a book? Surely not? I think it likely. Everyone seems to want all information on the net for nothing, but someone has to pay for content creation. Newspaper web sites have advertisements above and among the text in a way that would be unacceptable in the paper version.
It may not happen if technology can prevent copying so every reader pays, but no-one seems to have invented foolproof software to date.
Anyway advertising in books is not new ground – it was common in the 1940s, particularly in Penguin paperbacks.