Poised on the E-Brink

Can e-readers ever replace paper books, journals, magazines and other things we love to read?

asks Abby Lu in The Star's Metro section. She interviews a few guys including my own favourite tech geek, Leon Wing, Timothy Tiah of blogland's ad agency Nuffnang and Donald Kee of MPH who shows off the bookshop's e-readers.

The dingdongdingdong debate goes one with most of us not yet too sure how we'll feel about our reading delivered in this way, whether we will be full embracers or techno-luddites, or simply something sensible in-between.  If we're confused then the bookshops and publishers, take my word for it, are even more so.  We're all poised on the brink.

The Greenest Way to Read

Which is more environmentally friendly: an e-reader or an old-fashioned book? The New York Times has the answer for you after carrying out life-cycle assessments of both.  But, the article concludes :

All in all, the most ecologically virtuous way to read a book starts by walking to your local library.

Then again, for how much longer will your local library (even supposing you have one in the first place) have books printed on paper?
(Readers' responses to the article are here.)

Ebook Readers Arrive in Malaysia - Finally!

Last Sunday's Starmag carried the news that MPH will be bringing in stocks of an e-reader - at last! The device in question is called Hanlin, and is produced by China-based Tianjin Jinke Electronics.  (Pictured on the left in the hands of MPH's Rodney Toh.)

It will most probably be followed by models from companies such as Samsung, Toshiba and Asus (and Sony? A rather odd omission from the list.).

Hanlin was chosen, apparently :

... because of its flexibility: it can read a wide range of files, including the new eBook industry standard, Adobe ePub, as well as PDF and text files. ... This means it can download eBooks from different online stores, not just MPH’s.

(This is important to me, since much of what I need to read are unpublished manuscripts which are expensive and time consuming to print off, and impossible to read comfortably on present computer screens.)

MPH plans to sell 200,000 eBooks of current titles in the first half of this year through its online bookstore mphonline.com

One particularly interesting point made in the article is that mphonline is in a great position to promote Malaysian literature overseas. Donald Kee says :

There are a lot of Asian authors that are underrepresented, such as Malaysian, Singapore and Thai authors ... we want to become a platform to showcase these writers to rest of the world.

The device is reviewed in next Sunday's edition, so we'll see how it measures up.

But, one wonders, is it already too late for the eBook reader?  The newly unveiled Apple iPad looks impressive and can do so much more ...

Kindle Bells

On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books.

Amazon said yesterday that its e-book reader, the Kindle, had become "the most gifted item" in its history, and with that an e-book corner has been turned.

Sneek Peek of Barnes and Noble's E-Reader

If there's one thing I want more than a Kindle, then it could be the new Barnes and Noble e-reader (as yet unchristened) produced by Plastic Logic, and due to be formally announced on October 20th. There's a sneak peek on the mobilitysite.com website, and it really is a very pretty little gadget a true *sigh* object of desire ...

Kindle Goes International - Sorta

Talk about a news item which gets your hopes up, and then cruelly dashes them a moment later.

Amazon announced yesterday that its Kindle e-book reader would now be available in an international edition, the price has also been dropped to (US$259) and it would ship to 100 countries.

Sadly, Malaysia is not one of them (neither are Canada, New Zealand, and the countries in this region).

I got a bit humphy I'm afraid, especially as I was watching all the excited booklovers jumping up and down for joy on Twitter, where this quickly became a trending topic. I felt left out. I felt hurt and neglected. I came face to face with the realisation of how much I want this bloody device!

I shot off an email to Amazon to ask why we weren't included, wondering whether it was (as Eyeris and Umapagan had tweeted back to me, because Malaysians don't read enough!) or was it an issue with licensing.

I was pleasantly surprised when I got a reply an hour or so later from Amazon spokesperson Cinthia Portugal herself, telling me :

We want to ship Kindle everywhere and we’re working hard on it, but at this time we are not able to ship to Malaysia. ... This is an audacious first step, and we will continue to innovate on behalf of our customers and expand our offerings – we know that there will be other steps, but we’re happy with where we are starting and we think our customers will be too.

So hopefully, we will be there somewhere in the expansion plans. I thought it was interesting too that Amazon seems to be doing a better job with its corporate communications than it did when the Homozone.com scandal came to light.

By the way, it seems there is a workaround solution for those desperate enough : one Singaporean customer at Amazon.com notes:

the wireless doesnt work outside of the USA - you can still buy books using your amazon account online and then download them to your PC and upload them via a cable to your kindle- not exactly instantaneous - but much easier (and cheaper) than slugging it down to orchard to Kino or Borders! Kindle rocks.

A Library Without Books

When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books ...

says Cushing Academy headmaster James Tracy. The administration of the 144 year old school, west of Boston, has decided to go entirely bookless, believing that the future of reading is digital.

LibraryThing's Tim Spalding said a few hours ago on Twitter :

I'm a tech entrepreneur. I'm more pro-tech than anyone I know. But I see ebooks as a disaster for everything I care about. Crazy?

Nope, I don't think so. And a library without physical books really scares me, to be honest.

Piracy and Ebooks

I don't think we can stop others from copying – it's a lost cause. Copying is actually wonderful, and I have copied my head off since I first snuck into the photocopy room at my dad's office in 1980. My problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity, and free ebooks generate more sales than they displace.

At The Guardian Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow explains why free ebooks should be apart of the plot for writers. He puts all his books online (for example, you can download Hugo nominated Little Brother here) as soon as they are released in print.

Meanwhile, The Independent has a guide to the top 10 most pirated eBooks of 2009 via BitTorrent (a free file-sharing application), self-help and sex being the most popular topics. Be warned - one or two of these titles are banned in Malaysia, including The Kama Sutera. (Ahem!)

But legitimate ebook sales are taking off too - so let's have no more cynicism about whether it will happen. Amazon.com revealed back in May that 35% of book sales are for the Kindle in areas where it is available.

The Future of the Book ... is Here

Books in the future will be an experience in cross-media. We need to look to the gaming industry to see a space where people are not constrained by the old forms. Fiction authors will become creators of worlds that readers populate like World of Warcraft.

Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn blog attends attends a talk given by Bob Stein, founder and co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book. She makes a good case for saying that the future that Stein predicts is actually already here.

She lists some of Stein's other thoughts : just ponder the implications :

• Don’t confuse an object with its purpose. The physical book is not its content
• Books are the vehicles that humans use to move ideas around in time and space
• A book is a place where readers (and sometimes authors) congregate
• In non-fiction authors become leaders of communities of enquiry
• Old school authors’ commitment is to engage with subject matter for the benefit of future readers. New school authors engage with readers in the context of subject matter.
• Authors will need to engage with the community around the work they create
• The anxiety about saving a ‘version’ of the content as a printed book will go away. The content will have more of a timeline, a snapshot approach, developing all the time.
• The author will become more like a professor in a class of students. S/he will lead the conversation and point out what may be relevant but the ideas will be in collaboration with the audience/readers.
• Traditional booksellers may be safe in this lifetime, but “your children should go into another career”
• Traditional publishing acts as an intermediary between an author and a reader. Their role in the future will be to build and nurture the community that exists around the author and their work
• E-readers will soon be good enough that they will take off in mainstream. Bob will simultaneously publish his next book in print and ebook formats.
• Print-on-demand is fantastic and will play more of a part as bookstores and publishers go bust

This Bespells Doom ...

One of the problems with ebooks is - you can't get authors to sign them at book events. Or can you?

Apparently David Sedaris signed a Kindle at a reading from When You Are Engulfed in Flames at the Strand bookstore in Manhattan :

A man named Marty who had waited in the book-signing line presented his Kindle, on the back of which Mr. Sedaris, in mock horror, wrote, “This bespells doom.” ... Mr. Sedaris wrote in a recent e-mail message that he has actually signed “at least five” Kindles, and “a fair number of iPods as well, these for audio book listeners.”

The strangest thing he says he has signed though was :

... a woman’s artificial leg ...

How the E-Book Will Change Things

I knew then that the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.

Steven Johnson at The Wall Street Journal* contemplates the profound ways in which the very nature of reading is set to change with the advent of e-books.

The biggest downside he reckons, is that :

... one of the great joys of book reading -- the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas -- will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.

And here's what I want e-books to become - Vooks! Let's enjoy our printed on paper books, but use the technology for something more exciting.

(*Thanks, Chet!)

Kindle Kindle Little Star

I wonder how many folks in the US and UK woke up yesterday to find a Kindle under their Christmas tree? Not as many perhaps as would have like them, since Amazon ran out of stock!

In the New York Times Brad Stone and Motoko Rich reckon that the ebook reader has started to take hold. Notes Gregory Cowles on the Paper Cuts blog :

Kindles are a regular sight on my train these days, and seem poised to become as ubiquitous as iPods ...

But if Amazon blew the full potential of the Christmas opportunity, it gave Sony's e-reader, currently being marketed quite agressively in the States, a more than fighting chance. Other competitors are on the horizon.

And apparently it's on the cards that soon new books will start to be published in e-book format first. That's the point at which the ereader, I think, will really start to take off.

When on earth is the technology going to come here??? I hate being left behind ...

The tREADmill!

It doesn't actually exist yet, but it should! It's the brainchild of David Friedman :

... some people see the treadmill as a good place to get some reading done. I see them struggling to figure out how to place a book or magazine on the machine without it falling, and even with a Treadmill Book Holder, it can be awkward to turn the pages. ... how about adding an eBook reader to the list of treadmill features?

As Carolyn Kellog says on the Jacket Copy blog :

It seems like an obvious pairing. And just think, you could choose to read a haiku for a very, very short workout, or call up some Dickens for a marathon. ...The best part of all is David's name for his invention: the tREADmill.

Does your Gadget Pass the Shoe Test?

Gizmodo reckons that the new reader by Plastic Logic (unveiled at Demo Fall 08 conference in San Diego) could be the "Kindle killer":

Here is what the clunky Amazon Kindle should have been since the beginning: a simple, ultra-sleek full-page 8.5-inch by 11-inch electronic book and newspaper reader with a flexible plastic touchscreen, Wi-Fi connectivity, and the ability to read regular Office documents without conversion of any kind.

Better still:

According to the company, the reader is tough enough to resist getting hit with a shoe, which is exactly what I wanted to hear because that's how I test the toughness of my devices. Hitting them with shoes and/or toasted baguettes with butter and apricot jam.

I am consumed with desire for this ebook reader already.

(Found via Conversational Reading.)

Digital D-Day?

More ebooks vs trad book debate in the British press following the announcement yesterday that the Sony reader will be sold from September by Waterstones bookshop for £199 (which is a hell of a lot less than the cost of the iLiad favoured by Borders).

Every business on which the development will have an impact – from booksellers, publishers and e-tailers – will be watching how UK consumers take to e-book readers ...

the Bookseller notes while Graeme Neill on the Bookseller blog considers the knock-on effect for the British publishing industry, and wonders what Amazon.com will do now - they have thus far refused to discuss a UK launch date for the Kindle. (Are they playing a wait-and-see game?)

However, Neill points out :

... the most interesting thing that will happen over the 12 months is whether the public are convinced. A £199 price point is attractive to early adopters but according to our features editor Tom Tivnan, the only member of The Bookseller to use the device, it is clunky to use. With the likes of the Nintendo DS and iPod on the market, the public is used to beautifully designed products that scream 'must have'. Will the Iliad and Sony Reader capture the imagination in the same way?

John Sutherland muses about the advent on the ebook on the Guardian blog and its likely impact :

... my feeling is that the current batch of e-readers are still two electronic generations premature. We await the Model T. But the seed is sown, and we won't have to wait long - the market is too big not to be filled. Will it kill the traditional book? No more than TV killed the movies, or the movies killed the theatre. It will, of course, change the cultural constellation. But, having enjoyed 500 years of dominance, the codex book can't complain about taking a back seat for the next half millennium. ... What the e-reader means - in the not too distant future - is as much of a cultural explosion as the "rather unusual manuscript" brought with it in the 15th century. It's not a storage device but a portal, a Lewisian wardrobe, opening into new worlds. New possibilities in linkage and illustration will supplement facsimile type.

Sutherland's vision of the future of the ebook is just beautiful (and - ahem - similar to my own!) :

In a few years, you'll be able to hear the author's voice - should you so wish - or switch between script and oral versions, full-text or abbreviated text, or digest. You'll be able to "dialogue" the book, or its maker. Soundtracks will be as possible, and as enriching, as they are with movies. Media mix will create new realms of literary artistry. Perhaps even smells. ... In 20 years, we won't know how we lived without the thing.

Postscript (27/7/08) :

There's a very interesting debate about ebooks in The Observer. Author Peter Conrad makes the case against them :

My iLiad may have gobbled up the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Dickens and DH Lawrence, but somewhere inside that slim slab of grey plastic they had apparently dematerialised, waiting to be summoned from the ether, page by page. All those thick books, heavy with experience, were now weightless, like ghostly replicas of the tattered, dog-eared, much-pored-over counterparts on my shelves. ... The iLiad, I discovered when I tried it out, is itself a merely metaphoric book. What you read is 'digital print' - print without an imprint, hovering in a grey cloud on the screen, remote from the gravity of the printing press or the flourishes of human handwriting.

But novelist Naomi Alderman sees the ebook's tremendous potential :

What's most exciting about ebooks is not what they can do at the moment but what they may do in the future. The iLiad can connect to the internet: imagine reading Middlemarch and, at a touch of a button, being able to look at images of the same paintings and sculptures Dorothea looks at in Rome or, for academics, being able to see links to all articles which reference the passage you're reading. ... Works written specially for the ebook reader are an even more exciting prospect. A piece of 'ebook native' fiction may allow you to hear the birdsong while reading a romantic outdoor scene, or may automatically subscribe you to a fictional newspaper mentioned in a crime thriller. Some will consider such things gimmicky and a threat to 'proper' reading, but different kinds of text can co-exist. Audiobooks haven't killed the printed word, television hasn't killed radio. What we're seeing isn't the death of the book, but the creation of a new art form. ... That form is still in its infancy, but as a novelist I'm excited by the creative opportunities it will bring. Meanwhile, as a reader, I'm simply excited by the possibility of regaining some floorspace. The e-reader will never completely replace paper books, but it's got an awful lot to recommend it.

Kindling Unease

Anything that lasts 500 years is not easily improved upon. Books are so good you can’t out-book the book.

Those would be wise words coming from anyone, but how much more powerful coming from one of the key players in the e-book revolution, Jeff Bezos?

Despite a rapid increase in sales of ebooks, and in particular Amazon's Kindle, Bezos explains, at the biggest US bookfair BookExpo America, why he doesn't think the paper book is going away any time soon. In fact, he says that consumers who have bought Kindle are purchasing more physical books than before - a very interesting claim.

Edward Wyatt's article in The New York Times also shows that the Kindle has competitors and booksellers rattled - not least because Amazon is selling ebooks for less than it pays publishers - a ruse that will surely lure consumers to choose the Kindle over other devices. Why you might end up with a total monopoly!

World domination of the book trade isn't all Bezos has set his cap at :

... he waxed enthusiastic about how his “lottery ticket” wealth from the success of Amazon is allowing him to invest in a project to provide commercial travel to suborbital space.

Passengers taking a Kindle along to provide a little in-flight reading, of course.

E-Babel?

As e-book reader iRex's iLiad goes on sale Borders in the UK (for £399) Tom Tivan in The Bookseller looks at the bewildering multiplicity of ebook formats available which has lead some to dub the situation e-babel.

(I think the little cartoon showing the battle of the railway gauges draws a very clever analogy.)

Here's a list of the devices to date :

Launched

iRex iLiad - Holland-based firm launched the first e-reader in the UK this month, sold exclusively in Borders. Uses Linux operating systems which allows third-party development. Supports wi-fi.
Formats: XHTML, .pdfs, Mobipocket.
Retail price: £399

On launchpad

Sony Reader Launched in the US in 2006 and a 2.0 version is widely tipped to be released in the UK later this year. Titles can be purchased from Sony's Connect website which has about 40,000 titles. Can play MP3 files.
Formats: BBeB Book, Adobe pdf, Jpegs, can support Microsoft Word with conversion.
Retail price: $299

Amazon Kindle Released last November in the US to much fanfare. Features include wireless connectivity which enables downloads direct to the Kindle without a computer. Currently about 125,000 Kindle titles available from Amazon.com. UK launch TBA.
Formats: Kindle (.azw), can also read non-DRM Mobipocket files.
Retail price: $399

Two to watch

Cybook Gen 3 French firm Bokeen's device launched in the US and France in October 2007. Stores up to 1,000 books and the company promises a 100-day battery life for the casual reader.
Formats: Mobipocket, PalmDoc, HTML, .txt, .pdf.
Retail price: $350

Redius Polymer Vision Spin-off of Dutch electronics giant Philips says it will launch its mobile phone/e-book reader in the UK later this year. The device, the size of a normal mobile phone, has a five-inch "rollable screen".
Formats: TBA. Retail: TBA

McCrum in Ten Chapters

The Observer's literary editor Robert McCrum hangs up his hat after more than 10 years in the job and gives us a fascinating whistle-stop tour of the changes he has seen in the publishing world in that time.

Along the way he shares his thoughts on subjects such as: Zadie Smith and the new generation of authors; how Amazon.com has changed the retail market; the rise and rise of Rowling; Franzen snubbing Oprah; the explosion of literary festivals; how literary prizes have come to be the most reliable guides in a perplexing landscape; why McEwan's success typifies the decade; how blogs have taken over the role of reviewing; how Lynne Truss talks to our anxiety in an age of cultural upheaval; and finally, the Kindle.

This article is a must-read for anyone interested in the trends, and it's nice to discover that McCrum is very optimistic about the future of the book :

... what I have described are the birth pangs of a golden age. The market for the printed book is now global; the opportunities for the digital book are almost unimaginable. To be a writer in the English language today is to be one of the luckiest people alive.

Digital Fictions

A couple of months ago, I put up a post on digital fiction which provoked a fair bit of discussion. Now there are some beautiful examples of how such stories might work on the Penguin website.
Over the last six weeks top authors have been putting their work on line at We Tell Stories. Each tale pays homage to one of the novels in the Penguin Classics series and shows the possibilities of the medium.

Charles Cumming's 21 Steps of course echoes John Buchan's 39 Steps, and is designed for Google maps. Toby Litt revisits M.R. James classic ghost story The Haunted Doll's House. Litt's Slice is told through blog entries and Twitter messages.

Kevin Brooks offers you an interactive fairy story. Husband and wife team Nicci French actually wrote Your Place or Mine live online in real time. (How brave is that?)

Matt Mason and Nicholas Felton write an updated Hard Times for teenagers in the information age, while Mohsin Hamid draws on 1001 Nights for inspiration for his The (Former) General in his Labyrinth.

Just a little footnote. Over the past few weeks I've been back in teacher education watching trainee teachers doing microteaching (a simulation lesson using their classmates to roleplay their class). I have been so pleasantly surprised by the confidence with which the trainees have integrated internet and computer technology into their lessons ... and really jealous that none of this was available to me when I was an English teacher!

As I read these digital fictions, I was imagining what great use could be made of them in the language classroom. And I think it would be fun to write interactive stories too.

(Thanks to friends who dropped by to nudge me to blog about this. Sorry I took so long!)

Will Piracy Kill the Author?

Although this blogger has been (generally) gung-ho about e-books and stuff for free on the internet the pronouncement by Britain's Society of Authors that piracy on the internet could drive authors to stop writing gave me a timely slap on the face.

Illegal downloading, which has sent the music industry into a tailspin, is also now apparently causing havoc in the book industry :

Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl with a Pearl Earring, who also chairs the London-based organisation, said her members were deeply concerned that the publishing industry was failing to adapt to the digital age

writes Ben Hoyle in the Times :

The internet is awash with unlicensed free digital copies of individual chapters, or in some cases, entire books.

Although some of the victims are prominent authors such as Jamie Oliver and J.K. Rowling, the authors of the kinds of books you tend to dip into are the most vulnerable, including authors of short stories, writers of cookbooks, and lesser-known poets.

Chevalier says that a new model of payment for authors needs to be found :

... possibly by making the content available free to all and finding a way to get paid separately.

But it is of course anyone guess how this might work in practice.

Meanwhile, Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading isn't so sure that Chevalier et al have it right.

Postscript :

This is how easy it is to get hold of a pirated e-book.