The Future of the Book

I sometimes go through my elibrary in the same way I do as when standing in front of a bookshelf. The real problem with my e-library right now – as I imagine is the case with most people – is that it is made up largely of cheap classics and other free books, and only a small handful of items that I have spent real money on and consequently spent real time with; books that make me hesitate when I step in front of them or as on the screen when my wrist and forefinger manoeuvre them by my eye. But mostly, it's like a bad library full of the kind of books I periodically have to shove into a box and haul to the basement – perhaps with a tinge of remorse – as I think that when I buy another bookshelf I will bring back out and display again.

For now, e-books libraries are an odds and sods of cheapies, mark-downs and overstock that do not evoke a lot of respect, honour, time invested or obligation. That I think will change. I sometimes wonder if booksellers will take to doing what the CD and later the DVD industry did. Discs were once hailed as wonderful “little” inventions that would save incredibly on storage and we all bought those CD binders and stuffed them with 50 CDs and showed them to our friends and marveled at their compactness. Today stores still sell CDs and DVDs by they case; they imitate books, they open like a book have spines like a book, and are placed on a shelf like a book. Music distribution companies invest thousands and thousands of dollars in the creation of CD case covers which, like book covers, you can't even see on a store shelf unless you pull it out after you were attracted by the spine. Maybe booksellers will take to creating little boxes that look like a book and have nothing inside but a download code. A kind of phantom book in which all the words created by the author exist only in a short alpha-numeric sequence.

My daughter, like millions of other people, has been raised on music accessed solely through a digital library; some of which were even acquired legitimately. What has made that work is that music is more or less free or extremely cheap. We have all heard the music industry lament endlessly about what that has done to creators. No doubt if ebooks were all largely free – not just the fiction but the history, the travel, the textbooks, the self-help guides, and tech manuals – then I'm sure we would not all only buy one of those ereaders, we would buy into the whole technology cycle and acquire latest of the "soon to be released." I'm sure society would suddenly drop its objections, forsake the “I can't read for more than twenty minutes on a screen” mantra and undertake a quick adoption. Writers have been working for next to nothing anyway and as an industry are even poorer that creators of music – if that is possible. So digital adoption of books may work. If the two or three large publishers and the online distribution networks and technology creators (and now literary agents) just figure out how to keep getting their cut, then I am sure the writers will keep on writing and may even write more and better stuff.

When it comes to books, we are all monists. We all believe that pages bound in a cover are something more than a collection of printed words and a picture on cardboard. When you see someone open a book in a crowded metro or an airport we all feel a tinge of envy, we know that person is escaping from the commute or boredom and that the physical book is the portal that enables the shift. There is no reason why the iPad, iphone, the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, or the Sony e-reader cannot do the same. We are more justified in thinking of these devices as portals, than we are in thinking so of pages of print. But somehow the sense of the tension fading through the shoulders of a commuter when they break open a book with their thumb to the spot where they left off, just doesn't ring true in the same way if the page were to come into existence when a button is pushed.

The benefits of ereaders are rich to be sure and the reading community has probably only begun to tap the benefits. But not all technologically convenient advances have the staying power of traditions that have developed and evolved in society over time. The digital watch was once hailed as a device superior to the traditional clock-face. Digital watches were immediately accepted as a true convenience, the accuracy they offered was embraced, and most everyone converted to the digital watch within the span of a couple years. Its demise was a little slower but, in the space of a few more years, its adoption was almost completely reversed. I don't remember anyone actually saying they preferred the traditional twelve hour watch-face to a digital read-out – everyone just drifted back. The reason was straightforward and obvious – the watch-face was more than a circle divided into twelve sectors, it was a planner, it was someone's day, an instantaneous reckoning of meetings, engagements, work, home-life and it mimicked how society had come to look at time and the management of time so intuitively that no one really questioned it as a superior way of relaying time. People still love the accuracy of digital time keeping; as one can see in how, it is favoured on the bedside table for a once daily viewing of the morning's shock, or in a car where one ought not to be staring at a dashboard while reflecting on the day's obligations.

Like the watch-face, the book is something more than it appears to be. It is a physical appointment with, often enough, an escape to a world in another place bound to ink on a page, an appointment with one's self in the thickness of pages. It contains its own world like our own. And when the commuter picks up that book they enter that world at a certain place.

I'm not sure whether the book will survive the e-reader, but I am convinced that those ereaders that can imitate a pile of bounded pages, printed on both sides, sown or glued together, and bound with a picture on cardboard will have the most success.