Books that aren't books

Artículo publicado en Revista Debate y traducido al inglés.

Books that aren’t books

Stephen King has sold somewhere between 300 and 350 million books. His novels on terror, fantasy or science fiction are available in both paperback and hardback format. That’s paper with printed words on it. At then end of the day, books. However at the beginning of this year the well known author surprised the world by launching his latest novel “Ur” and his first book that isn’t a book. This very special edition will only be available on digital devices and can be purchased for just three dollars.

One of the world’s greatest and oldest cultural industries is going through a historic moment. The evolution of electronic books (eBooks), the great proliferation of titles in this format and their positive reception on behalf of their readers opens the debate about the future of the worldwide book publishing business.

Is it possible that in 10 years time we will not be reading any more books printed on paper? The first chapter of this story – still with an unclear ending – has now been written. An electronic device that can condense everything from the Bible to The Little Prince into one has now arrived.
On the 24th of February, Amazon.com one of the world’s largest e-commerce sites launched Kindle 2, the second version of its device for reading digital books commonly called eBooks. This slim device can store up to 1500 books and can also be used to download magazines and newspapers and to retrieve one’s e-mail.

For the moment Amazon has an accumulated offering of some 245,000 tiles for Kindle but it is just a question of time before the arrival of all books in this format. There are many candidates vying to digitalize whole libraries, while others such as Google have been doing so for years. This gigantic and costly task will undoubtedly result in an inevitable concentration of authors rights into fewer publishing houses.

The disappearance of the book in its physical form, and the enormous cultural changes that will come about, have already opened a lively debate that divides the interested parties into two distinct camps or libraries.

According to Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Kindle, this device is not coming to replace the readership of books but rather to “preserve this great tradition and to make it evolve even more”.
Besides its nifty product attributes in terms of weight and storage capacity this technology launch stands apart from many others for one very improbable reason: its great impact among the adult population. Not just young people start to use it but also more experienced readers. That is why it can be considered as almost an ambivalent device, innovative sure, but also “conservative”. Amazon plans on selling a million units in 2009, and close to 3.5 million in 2010.
The reach of electronic books will not be restricted to these devices alone. The Apple iPhone places at the disposition of its users a similar book reading application and all the major brands have commenced the process of converting their mobile phones into walking books.

Hernán Casciari, writer and founder of Orsay.es, one of the most read blogs in the Spanish speaking world writes: “I am reading a marvelous book, heavy and fat (some 1,600 pages) and for the first time in my life as a reader I start to feel the urgency of the electronic book. We have become accustomed to the shift key, hypertext and having to manage three to five ideas at a time. Returning to the simple unidirectional book is like having to start a fire with a stick and a stone”.

In a technology blog a user asks and then answers his own question: In truth, do you want your whole life to be digital? Yes!

Quite to the contrary, Sven Birkerts, American essayist, critic and author of the book “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age”, sustains in an article published in The Atlantic magazine that the book “is part of a cultural system” and his fear is that “Kindle will be to literature and the humanities what Wikipedia has become to information: a one-stop outlet”.

It is clear that the reading of books in digital format does not just mean a simple a change of habits for readers – or a cultural revolution – but rather augurs concrete reforms in the publishing business.

The price of titles has diminished considerably in the transition from paper to digital. On Amazon.com one can acquire the latest releases for ten dollars and download classics to the monitor for just two dollars. Numbers that diminish significantly, based on similar experiences in other industries always tend to lower, never to increase.

Piracy and the possibility of users sharing books from one device to another or the arrival of a new Napster (peer to peer system for downloading music without paying rights) for published material are just some of the phantasms lurking over the pages of this novel.

The experience of the music industry that invented the iTunes micro-payments model (by charging one dollar for each soundtrack) following years of dire hardship has possibly created a less rocky road to be followed in the conflict over books. Getting users accustomed to paying for content, even in much more modest amounts, appears to be the key. Since the leading cases provide the model to follow, the early beginnings of this relationship, in which readers continue to pay, would appear to smooth the way forward.

Finally, the approaching world of the digital book also brings with it some big news. Just like what happened on the Internet where anyone can now create their own media communications platform, launching one’s own book will be even easier than planting a tree. Amazon has created a digital text platform that allows any writer in a just a few steps, without intermediaries, to publish his own text and share in a percentage of the sales.

And in the very name of the product that will slowly revolutionize one of the most aged industries of our culture there is controversy. Some would claim that in the name chosen by Amazon they express their true mission, “to burn the books”. The word kindle is after all synonymous with igniting a fire.