At Home with John and Debbie

Since talking about the Kindle the other day, I’ve been reading articles and comments, and thinking about eBooks some more.

A pervasive attitude is one of reverence towards the book’s form. You can’t replace a book, people say, because the shape of a book, it’s cover art, its smell. All these things are important, they say.

This is true, for some books and for some people.

Apologies to its designers, but nobody can tell me that my 1992 Wordsworth Classics edition of Alice in Wonderland is an artefact of great beauty. It’s cheaply bound on rough paper; the print is blotchy. It was a publisher’s effort to get the text on the retailer’s shelf at the lowest cost possible. True, that rough paper might be like the smell of madelaines to Proust for someone who’d enjoyed that edition as a child, but nostalgia’s a pretty unworthy emotion, and who’s to say that in ten years’ time, adults won’t see a first generation Kindle in a second hand shop, and sigh with nostalgia for the first time they read Harry Potter?

In principle, cheap binding is no barrier to the pleasantness of a book as an artefact, but in practice maybe it is. My parents had a number of classic orange Penguin paperbacks when I was a child, from which pages would fall out as you read. Quaint, but a bloody nuisance.
The three paperbacks I bought this week, I’m not ashamed to admit, I chose partly for their size — they won’t take too much space in my luggage. They will slip comfortably into the pocket in an aeroplane seat back. When I think of those novels in future, I doubt I’ll even remember their shape or size.

The parallel with music is striking. When CDs were introduced, many scoffed. The packaging is too small; too sterile, it was said. But I like getting up to turn it over, people said. People made fatuous comments about rolling joints on album sleeves. I finally relented to CDs, and I’m still not quite comfortable with music downloads, in which there is no packaging at all. There are millions of consumers happily buying MP3s. My sentimental doubts aren’t stopping them.

What really matters is the music. For books, what really matters is the words.

There’s a lot of bibliophiles in the world. Lots of people who love books, who love to have shelves groaning with a lifetime’s worth of books. They will claim that they love to pick up a favourite from the shelf, leaf to a particular passage, and re-read it. I’m not going to call them liars, but I’ll wager that in there’s only a handful of books they return to, and that in fact they could manage perfectly happily with one modest bookshelf of essentials.

But that’s not the point. They love to own books, and who is to begrudge them that pleasure. The point is twofold: not everyone is like them, and the Amazon is not aiming the Kindle at them.

A person who is in thrall to the laden bookshelf, and the fetishisation of the book as an object, is never going to succumb to the eBook. As a bookseller, Amazon is surely perfectly happy to continue selling these people paper, for as long as they keep buying it. Strike them off the list of target markets.

As a species we’re terribly bad at realising that other people are different from us (except when we decide they’re sufficiently different from us that they should go back where they came from and stop taking our jobs and women). Book collectors are no exception. They find it hard to imagine that a person might want to read and not care that they’re holding the same physical item the used for their last read.

Or, more realistically, they harbour similar feelings of fondness for paper, but have other priorities that outweigh those feelings. One person might, for example, have put aside his desire for a well-stocked bookshelf, in favour of an itinerant lifestyle. Many people in their first few years after leaving home, don’t expect to live in the same house for more than six months at a time. Portability may well trump aesthetics for such a person.

Others will find a compromise. They’ll keep paper copies of favourite books, prestige titles with colour illustrations or particularly nice binding, oversize works, art books, atlases, and so on, while reading day-to-day novels as eBooks. Or, they’ll buy most of their books on paper, and use an eBook reader for holidays, or commuting, or for titles that are unavailable on paper. It’s not all-or-nothing.

The cost of the Kindle is a common objection in blogs and comments. No doubt, at $400, the Kindle is too expensive for many people, myself included. It seems awfully short sighted, however, to restrict the discussion the present. The first version of a product like this is going to sell to early adopters — people who like gadgets and have enough disposable income that $400 doesn’t sting. Handily for Amazon, there’s a correlation between intelligence and reading, and another correlation between intelligence and wealth, so there’s enough of those early adopters to be getting along with. Think more ‘there’s a sizeable pool of rich people who like reading’ rather than ‘people who read are rich’.
It’s fairly easy to predict what will happen to the eBook market. The early adopters will provide feedback and allow the manufacturers to improve the products. As the products improve, word of mouth and marketing will increase the market for them. As the market increases, economy of scale and maturation of the technology will make the devices cheaper to manufacture. The current generation of iPod is cheaper, easier to use, has a clearer screen, can hold more content and do more things, than the first generation. There will be $100 Kindles before we know it.

One final thing I’ve spotted - an objection to any comparison of iPods and eBook readers. Books, it said, do not come in three minute chunks like music. Nobody wants a shuffled playlist of reading.

The objection assumes that shuffling is the iPod’s raison d’etre. I  use my iPod a lot, and I hardly ever shuffle. I still listen to albums from beginning to end. For me, but not for everybody, the iPod’s benefit is purely its portability.
But then again, do books really not come in short chunks? Novels don’t, but there are certainly short stories you can read in less time than an Orb album track takes to warm up. A typical magazine article or essay would be shorter still. Then think of  books like The Crack-a-joke Book, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink, or Schott’s Original Miscellany. These collect items that can be read in a couple of seconds. Does anyone want to sit on the bus reading a randomly ordered set of entries from those three books? I don’t — but someone might. An eBook of Schott’s Original Miscellany might well benefit from a shuffled presentation. It is after all a title designed to be dipped into at random.

It’s fairly conventional wisdom that the popular musical form of the day is dictated by the technology used to deliver it: the concerto is limited by the stamina of the performers and the bladders of the audience; a pop song is three minutes long because that’s what fits on a 7″ single; an album used be around 45 minutes long with a break in the middle because that’s what fitted on a 12″ LP. Now it’s grown longer, to fit on a CD.
It’s been suggested (I think by Paul Morley) that digital delivery of music has freed musicians from those limits, and that we’re beginning to see the results — startlingly short tracks (and not intended as part of an album, either), or continuous pieces lasting for hours. Who knows what norm we’ll settle on.

I think it’s entirely likely that the eBook reader will spawn new forms of writing, just as the Web browser spawned the blog (in its myriad of species). I can’t predict what that form will be like, but I look forward to finding out.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 09:26 and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.