To Kill a Reading Book
This article is part of the Future of Technology series by Rory Gilchrist.
As an increasing number of online bookstores begin offering ebooks and magazine publishers rush to the revolutionary tablet platform, the death of the printed media seems to be growing ever closer. Could the 5000 year old tradition of paper based writing soon be coming to an end, or is our bind to the book just too strong?
sxc / pepo
Since the dawn of the first personal computers and the creation of government networks, which we now call the Internet, the human race has sought new ways to digitise our media so it can be stored and shared forever.
In the last ten years, its not only the way in which we carry music, but how we buy it that’s changed. The digital revolution and rapid expansion of the Internet, has made buying music a lot easier, and a lot cheaper. The biggest winners in this market being Apple with their now dominant iTunes.
The ebook is not a new concept; the idea has been toyed with for years. But what makes it different to its other digital counterparts is that it hasn’t been taken up quite as quickly. Throughout the last decade we saw the rise of the MP3 player and iPod, in fact you could go as far as to say that the digital media player was a – or even the – defining piece of technology of the decade.
The ebook however failed to keep up with the change of pace and direction of digital sales. It wasn’t until 2007 that a reader type device reached the mass market and a standard, the epub format, was released.
Amazon’s roots in book sales made it no real surprise that they were first to the party with their Kindle device. When the Kindle was initially released it drew much attention, and soon many other companies were trying to get in on the show. Despite this, Amazon still leads the pack with various models of ereader and an ebook depository of over 410,000 books.
Image / Amazon
The iTunes model has proven to be very powerful for content that is destined for digital consumption and both the iBookstore and Kindle Store have stayed true to it. The tap and buy experience is effortless and cuts out the cost of delivering the physical book, which makes it much better for the environment as no trees need to be cut by carbon belching machines and no heavy transport is required. But despite getting the delivery method right, there is still a long way to go before the technology is complete, let alone ready to take the world of print head on.
The experience of the ebook must rival that of physical books and, in many aspects, beat it. The interfaces that exist now for ebooks are fantastic in their own right with tables of contents, text search, bookmarking and digital highlighting.
A great example of an area which the ebook is lightyears ahead of physical print is note-taking. To take notes on a physical book would mean irreversibly defacing the paper it’s printed on or writing on scraps of paper which will inevitably be lost. With ebooks however, there is the ability to jot notes which will then be indexed, organized and safely associated with the book and can therefore never get lost. This application can also allow you to share your notes with your peers without having to be in their presence.
While the current feature set works well with novels, its not quite the same with textbooks.
A key area for the success of the ebook is education. Education is a big spender when it comes to textbooks. There are plenty of textbook-gone-ebooks out there, but without an incentive to buy the ebook version, schools will stick to their old ways. Publishers and software engineers need to come up with methods to take the textbook to a whole new level with embedded digital content that can provide an unparalleled experience compared to printed books. Apple have demonstrated the use of imagery in their implementation of the ebook, but so far we have yet to see some real groundbraking content. More importantly, the use of images, videos and sounds within ebooks must be standardised to allow the same content to reach every platform.
Having said this, the ereader already does stand as a credible device for university students and researchers alike.
Students that require a large amount of reading will greatly benefit from buying an ereader or tablet device. Some universities in the United States have already begun providing iPads to students to help with their studies.
But a feature that seems to be missing from all major ebook retailers is a library system. Yes, it’s great for students and researchers to have access to thousands of books on one device, but an important flaw comes when readers only need a certain chapter or phrase from a book.
There are already many libraries around the world that are offering an ebook rental system, but this is not enough. For a library system to really take off the big players such as Amazon and Apple need to get involved.
sxc / mattox
In the field of digital delivery, a library system where users rent books for a certain amount of time, or on a subscription based model, wouldn’t be a new concept. iTunes and many other digital retailers allow users to rent television shows or films for a period of time. If this were to be applied to the ebook world from a major store, the shift from paper based media to digital media could likely be staggering.
The question about profitability must however be asked. A library system, if implemented correctly, could be incredibly profitable for digital retailers who choose to endorse it – a subscription fee could be charged with a check-in, check-out flow used to limit the books users have at any given time with books becoming instantly available on device after check-out.
As the world becomes more social, the sharing of ebooks must be taken into consideration. There needs to be a method that is both fair to the book publisher, but doesn’t slap the reader in the face. If I’m to lend someone a book, they take the physical copy and I have to do without. But in the world of digital, I can simply copy the file – a bit unfair on the author of the work.
The advantages of ereaders are clear: less to carry around, easy to get new content, great for the environment vs paper based media, the list goes on. But the fundamental issue that is stopping the ereader reach its full potential is it’s price tag. Ereaders need to be cheaper, the £109 Kindle is a good start, but we need to be talking around £20-£40 before they become properly accessible for the casual reader. Right up the other end of the scale however, is the iPad starting at £429, although this is by far the most expensive ereader. But it also has many other functions, and if we look back a few months, the Kindle was still around the same price.
No one is a stranger to how fast technology moves and although we still may be babies when it comes to ebooks, I envisage that by the end of the century the printing press will be losing ground to handheld devices, especially if the ebook ecosystem is brought onto a par with other digital content.
Will ereaders and ebooks take over from paper based media? Probably at some stage in the distant future, but before they do, lots must be done from the design and price of the device through to the reading experience. Many people who have known paper based books their whole life simply won’t be able to make the transition. To draw a comparison, reading an ebook is like listening to a Beatles CD, whereas touching, holding and reading a physical book is like listening to the Beatles live in concert.
Even if everything is done right with the ebook, it’s likely that paper books will still be with us – I don’t think that you could ever totally replace a medium that has survived the tests of time as well as the book.
This was this week’s edition of The Future of Technology To submit a question for next week’s edition, contact me on Twitter @RoryGilchrist.
Rory Gilchrist is a freelance web designer and journalist. His work can be followed on www.rorygilchrist.co.uk and on Twitter @RoryGilchrist.
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