The future of reading…..
Richard Charkin‘s blog has an interesting discussion about ereaders, following Andrew Marr’s piece last week in the Guardian, which you can read here. I’ve written my response, which goes along the following lines. I think most of us and the National Treasure that is Andrew Marr are all – sorry to say – just TOO OLD to really understand what is going to happen when the iPod moment happens with ereaders. It will be about fashion, not reading.
MP3 players had been around for ages before iPods hit the street, but what made the iPod an object of desire was a combination of great looks followed by capacity. It was very cool to be seen with. For those of us who remember, it’s like when the Walkman arrived and your mum and dad bought you a cheaper non-brand version. They didn’t get that the one you wanted was the original Walkman, because (to parahrase someone else) it’s the label stupid!
The label makes a statement (not least that you had enough music to fill your iPod – I can remember the “my library is bigger than yours” conversations taking place when I got my first iPod).
So far no ereader has made a fashion statement. They look functional and are functional, not cool. When one does – and it will be multi-functional (mobile phone, music, RSS etc etc) – they will be embraced first by cool hunters (esp younger readers) and then everyone else trying to look cool. Just like the iPod, just like MySpace, just like YouTube and the good old interweb itself.
All these innovations experience a noticable “greying” of their market when they become mainstream. This is because early adopters are predominantly young and are followed by parents and grown up kids like me.
The fatuous argument that books will stick around because you can “drop them in the bath” depresses the hell out of me. Of course, paper books will stick around, not least because they make better wallpaper than electronic files (sames as CDs), but the idea that a new generation who read their lessons from eBooks and use smart boards rather than blackboards in lessons will stick with paper because of tradition and literary heritage reflects the middle class ghetto in which most of the trade lives. As any teacher, there are a lot of children who grow up with NO or very few books in their home. They don’t necessarily have a “literary heritage” to marry them to the paper format.
The argument s often used to defend paper over ebooks often presuppose that all commercial fiction/nonfiction is equal. Most of it is disposable. An ereader is ideal for the majority of cheap commercial chart fodder, which will never appear in one of those leather bound heritage libraries on offer in the Sunday supps to people who don’t read but want to look like they do.
Finally, what I can’t wait to see is how creative people take up the challenge of creating a whole new reading experience offered by ereaders – or mooks – combining, games, music and animation in one reading experience. It could be playful, interactive and, most of all engaging. Now that is exciting, and I predict when we get an ebook that shakes cages like that, then everyone will want one.
5 Responses to “The future of reading…..”
I think this is a fascinating debate, but I agree with you that fashion will lead the way (however dispiriting that might seem). As you say, the early adopters of new technology are always the young. Older people might not prefer their books in e-form, it doesn’t mean that their ideas will hold sway in the future. Claiming to follow a literary heritage is surely doomed.
Don’t entirely agree with “the early adopters of new technology are always the young. ”
When, in 1997, I wrote to Louis Baum, then editor of The Bookseller, suggesting a website review column, I was 68.
I’m now almost 78 and still leap out of bed at 5.45 a.m. to spend a couple of hours online before breakfast.
Dangerous to generalise!
Anne
http://bookwormonthenet.blogspot.com
Yes, you are right, one shouldn’t generalise, but I had already set up an interweb site for my old magazine by then – in 1995…..
The following extract from ‘books at Auction’ probably won’t come out with the correct line-breaks, but it’s part of a long poem I wrote about the survival of the book. Personally I think the book WILL survive in its current form, if only because so many people are ardent fans of the book and specialist collectors of the same. Also, technology is not stable enough at the moment to make a complete transfer to that medium safe in terms of preserving data …
Jane Holland
*
Why buy them, to preserve them? Better
to let cyber-space have them, let them be words
on screen, seen and unseen, corruptible.
That page will fade, data disappear, no safer there
than between hard covers,
yet never so beautiful nor dangerous, something real
to hand on, like a name or a sword.
Say that under our fingers, our eyes
or here on the tongue, a book of light is rising:
the word that we made to be heard – dignified
godhead, salt-washed,
bound bone and blood in it,
went to the stake for it, then lost or discarded –
has been hidden from fire, riddled
with worms, pressed and spotted
by browned wild flowers,
over-written by notes scribbled
in margins, recipes
laid down on blank versos and these ghosts
on the flyleaf, the dates and names
of the faithful – when bought, when handed on,
where kept, by whom (though rarely why,
the hidden purposes of readers
blown like dust from gilt-edged spines).
Or rather say, look, this is what we achieved
in our age. This is a book.
Open it to the first page and read.
FROM: Books at Auction, “BOUDICCA & CO” (Salt Publishing, 2006)
In response to Anne’s comment, I think it would be fairer to say that technological trends driven by fashion are always taken up by younger people first. New technologies in general are taken up by the curious, and they occur at all stages in the life-cycle.
I think Danuta hits on a few very good points: one is that it is very hard to say that ereaders will explode along the same lines as the ipod, and secondly that the ebook format offers too much to not catch on.
It’s not just a matter of age that leaves her unsure of the technology’s future. I’m a student in his early 20′s, and I don’t know if a reading device will be able to embody a “mass-market coolness” in the way that the ipod has. Why? Because music is simply different to reading. I find it hard to picture an advertising campaign based on an ereader with the same impact of Apple’s dancing silhouettes in the ipod advert. Literature is something that it’s fans tend to enjoy due to its exclusivity. Of course I could be proved wrong…
My contemporaries and I are so used to the convenience of researching online that I’m sure a site selling electronic academic texts would make a killing. I’m sick of walking up to the library only to find that it’s closed due to a Bank Holiday, or that I haven’t got time to queue for the photocopier cos it’s nearly 7 pm. Both of these problems: access and distribution would not effect an e-book.
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