Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal October 2008 Volume 6(5)

E-books: a new chapter begins?

Will e-books bring a revolution or more of the same, ask Kathleen Menzies and Richard Fallis.

A few months ago, Private Eye featured a cartoon in which Snipcock and Tweed, the Eye’s beleaguered publishing duo, are confronted with an e-book and conclude that it spells doom for traditional books. "Thank God for that!" they cry, as they pause outside a bookshop window and contemplate the offerings: TV spin-offs, Jeffrey Archer’s latest, a slew of political biographies, and Russell Brand’s My Booky Wook.

Of course, condemning books in such terms is as narrow as arguing that television is worthless because of Big Brother, or cinema obsolete because so many films are remakes. Still, there may be justification for claiming that the mainstream of modern publishing is muddied by staleness and a lack of imagination. If this is the case, then perhaps the e-book, with its emphasis on innovation and looking anew at an old medium, deserves to be successful. The question is, will e-books be channels for fresh ideas or will their inventiveness be harnessed simply to provide newfangled access to the same old content?

The Kindle, Amazon’s hand-held e-book reader, has proved extremely popular and, unlike other readers, has generated quite a buzz. With deals recently being struck between leading bookshops and hardware manufacturers (Borders UK with iRex, makers of the iLiad Reader; Waterstone’s with Sony), e-books might finally be about to enter the public consciousness after years of false dawns. But, has their ‘revolutionary’ potential been overstated?

If it truly signals a paradigm shift, e-book production could allow talented but marginalised authors to make their works readily available, and to gain the readership that they deserve. On the other hand, if absolutely anyone is able to publish whatever they like, e-books might simply add fuel to the fire of mediocrity by turning book production into a vanity-publishing free-for-all. A kind of ‘natural selection’, set in motion by readers acting both as critics and quality-controllers, might weed out some of the dross, but such processes could easily be clouded by individual prejudice and manipulated by third parties. Editors, however pilloried, do serve a purpose; they flag up genuine talent and make the kinds of tough editorial decisions that authors themselves may baulk at. The egalitarianism of e-books might not best serve readers. On the positive side, it could prove a real boon to librarians, justifying our continued existence as guides, able to steer readers safely through a deepening morass of reading matter.

More and more publishers are declaring – tentatively – that e-books are the future. Partly, they may be hedging their bets, claiming a precautionary stake in the new technology so that, should e-books truly take off, they retain control over the medium and do not emulate the music industry, which spurned Internet downloads for years, and lost billions. But perhaps they are acknowledging, too, that e-books are now considered ‘safe’. At present, they largely signal only a literal change of the delivery medium and not of the paradigm. Beneath their surface shimmer, e-books will have much less of a philosophical resonance than the historic transition from scroll to codex.

It is probably more constructive to think of e-books as having the potential to supplement physical books. Seasoned researchers, for example, are unlikely to abandon books completely, but are even less likely to pass up the possibilities of e-books. In a time of paranoia over carbon footprints, e-books might prove instrumental in eliminating unnecessary journeys, demonstrating how technology can address problems that technology itself has spawned. In everyday terms, this also saves researchers and their institutions time and money.

The acceptance of e-books will only be accelerated by the involvement of billion-dollar corporations like Microsoft, whose Silverlight software has been at the forefront of most publicity for the British Library’s impressive ‘Turning the Pages’ 2.0 tool-kit . Certainly, being able to access, at the click of a mouse, William Blake’s personal folio complete with sketches, scribbles and fragments, or the amazing wood-block printed Diamond Sutra scrolls, is exciting and overcomes the familiar barriers of distance, accessibility, and fragility.

‘Turning the Pages’ is the kind of initiative that may make even the most ardently technophobic of bibliophiles see the value of e-books. By faithfully depicting rare and invaluable works in crystal-clear and magnifiable images, it presents the user with ‘3D’ e-books that are effective, functional facsimiles of the documents they represent (although there are some glitches from a user-interface point of view). Yet, at the same time, they acknowledge, in a variety of ways, the superiority of the originals. They create a desire in the reader to touch – albeit with gloved hands – the original pages and to peer, with fascination, at physical artefacts that are remnants of minds and thoughts long decayed.

The relationship between e-books and physical books will always be strong. The codex is the format that most readers prefer, not because they are reactionary, but because it is a design classic. The ultimate e-book, then, would be portable, light-weight,  durable, slimline, intuitive to grasp, annotatable, searchable, attractive, and affordable. You could use it in the bath, on a train, or inside a torch-lit tent on a remote, windswept hill-top. In other words, it would be exactly like a book. 

Kathleen Menzies is a Research Assistant at the Centre for Digital Library Research. kmenzies@cis.strath.ac.uk Richard Fallis is an Assistant Librarian within NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde. richard.fallis@ggc.scot.nhs.uk

Information Scotland Vol. 6(5) October 2008

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