Balls to Kindle: I have a bookshelf

A thousand tech journalists have already put this decade in a time-capsule and marked it mobile. Everything’s moved to a screen, gone flatter, gone smaller. Your phone’s a laptop, your laptop’s a telly, your telly’s a cinema. Your local cinema is closed.

And now, everyone’s gibbering on about shifting the way we read onto these faceless tablets which owe more to mobile chess-sets than design degrees; say more about luggage restrictions than an actual market requirement.

With Kindle and e-readers generally, they’re saying that this is how we’ll read books in the future. Reading 2.0, they probably want to say. And, by inference, they’re kind of suggesting that eventually, physical books will be obsolete.

But I don’t think that’s true – and I hope they don’t mean it.

Kindle’s fully hip in the US, and apart from the incident where Amazon deleted already paid-for content from their products without asking first, it’s getting a lot of positive coverage and blurb-y quotes from big-name writers. The international version’s coming, it has competitors, and its iPhone equivalent is also doing well. There’s going to be a lot of press about e-readers in the coming weeks, and a lot of debate too.

But while I get the principle – millions of books bought and sold wirelessly, read on a single tablet – and recognise the potential – literacy could improve where books aren’t readily available; e-readers could house textbooks and centralise a child’s learning resources – I can’t help feeling a twinge for bookshelves. I’ll always prefer a beautifully bound hardback. I can’t imagine a world without book covers.

I guess my argument’s simple, and probably I’ll sound like a traditionalist, a luddite or a tosser. Maybe all three. But it’s only simple because people love books as much for their format as for their content. You might already know that if you read a book on a laptop it’s different – it loses its face, and disconnects you from the writing in a way you can’t properly describe. Maybe it’s because I write myself, but when you read an old book, you read a year’s work at a typewriter. You imagine the frustrations and the temper, the elation of that first draft finished and the proof version arriving – a loose-bound dream filled with red marks and corrections.

You read a new book, and even if it’s been word-processed, you know it’s still been printed. Printed and scanned and proofed and scored with pencil. It’s been posted that way – to most publishers and agents anyway – and even if it’s submitted electronically, you can bet it’ll be printed out if there’s any kind of interest.

It’s a romantic notion, then. But to me, books are. I don’t want to sit on a train reading Alice in Wonderland in a way Carroll wouldn’t even understand. It’s a like a sneer; as if in plopping a novel next to a thousand others, in the same format, in the same jacket, in the same font, we’re somehow dismantling literature – our best achievement. Torn from its spine and squashed flat for scrollbars to browse, a book in an e-reader is the same as another, clinging to its title on a unit that’s basically a homologous hive-pile of words.

Certainly making a book anonymous has benefits for some. Good because if you’re so inclined, you can read a Mills and Boon in public without looking recently divorced, or fully unhinged. Good because nobody can tell you’re a 45-year old man reading Stephanie Meyer. Good because Mein Kampf has a bit of a stigma attached to it.

I’ve also enjoyed reading free extracts and downloads from publishers who understand Creative Commons, and who recognise that it’s good to try-before-you-buy. I’ve bought three books recently on the back of reading their first chapters online, and I’ll do it again – just as I’ve bought CDs after listening to bands on Spotify. But DRM restrictions make for silly hoops, and I’m not given to jumping through them.

I recognise that e-readers have professional benefits too. It’s no coincidence that the many people who champion these things are the ones whose professional lives are genuinely enhanced by them. A commissioning editor can look through twenty emailed manuscripts without lugging half a plantation onto the tube. A publishing MD can click through their latest acquisitions; an agent can read and reject their slush with ease.

So there’s absolutely a place for e-readers as a tool, and not least because publishing is a business that feeds off trends and unexpected successes. There’s also place for them because if you’re not keeping up, you’ll lose out. If publishers don’t pursue digital opportunities, they’ll look backwards, and they’ll risk being frozen out if they haven’t got a strategy for the Next Big Thing – whether that’s publishing their content electronically or not.

It’s just a shame that these aren’t people who read purely for enjoyment, or enrichment. They’re the early adopters, the gatekeepers, and they’re good at the word-of-mouth thing. We follow these people on Twitter because they know what they’re on about and it sounds like we’re moving towards some kind of utopian bookland, where we can get any book, any time. From these people, the future of publishing sounds healthy and good – but sometimes I wonder if that’s only because they’re shaping it around their vision.

We’re told e-readers will democratise publishing. But for every independent publishing company that makes content for e-readers innovatively and with great success, and for every single writer who self-publishes – bypassing editorial and funding meetings and using their online platform to sell their writing without a single physical copy being printed – there will be a bunch of big publishers who corner the market, pump thousands into marketing and dominate. E-readers will only ‘democratise’ publishing till the big boys work out how to undercut small publishers and offer more content for less. In the end, it could all end up like MySpace – once the fertile fields of the unsigned, now the cynical promotional tool.

For me, it’s a myth that through digital advances, publishing is a fairer industry. I learnt that when I worked at a small publishing company without much funding but with a lot of great ideas. But that’s another post entirely. I’d also say the biggest change in recent years is that unscrupulous, vanity-publishing bastards can prey on desperate writers with ease.

Smart, small publishers, with low overheads, and who already use POD to print at low cost, could do well. But I reckon any smaller publishers using the technology to great effect will grow and be bought out anyway. Have their ideas assimilated. That’s why I don’t think e-reading is going to change publishing itself in any big way – not for better, not for worse.

And then there’s DRM, copyright issues and pricing structures besides. Is it right to charge £10 for something you can’t even hold? When the paperback’s the same price? Is it even a sustainable model? And if you’re going to start giving e-books away for free, will we have to e-read George Orwell with adverts in the margins? Publishers are already and admirably putting content on their sites for free, and I’m glad of it. But when it comes to readers paying for this content, the industry needs to set standards early – and soon.

For now, I think if Steve Jobs and Dan Brown made love, they’d birth a Kindle. After all: e-reading is the perfect marketing bastard, born of no particular need and marketed to absolutes, just like iPods, just like the Da Vinci Code. For me, it’s a take-anywhere, use-always product that few people outside the publishing industry actually need – and I think a true, universal leap to Reading 2.0 will only happen when books stop being artefacts. E-readers have a place, but they won’t dominate.

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Photo credit: Erik Vanden @ Flickr