The Future of the Book

I am not a scholar of the humanities, I am however, a 'concerned citizen'. I care deeply about books - they play an important role in my life, intellectually, physically and emotionally. They also, as I am often reminded, play an important role financially. They have, since I was a child, obsessively purchasing Ladybird books, constituted a significant portion of my personal outgoings. I am, and here you get the full measure of my eccentricity, currently building a library, with wall to wall shelving, big leather armchairs, antique carpets and prints, to which I intend to retreat, in the moments of leisure I fondly imagine I might one day enjoy.

Despite my love of books - physical books - I am also an engineer and an instinctual 'early adopter' of technologies. I believe that despite the very significant practical virtues of print it is but one or two generations of e-reader away from redundancy. This makes me uncomfortable, is in fact deeply unsettling, but nevertheless demands recognition.

Travelling on the tube, I observe that kindle users are increasingly represented among the commuters absorbed in their recreational reading, a fair number of others are reading on iPhones and iPads. On a recent holiday almost all the loungers around the pool toted kindles. Anecdote, yes, but indicative of the speed and direction of travel. Perhaps, at a stretch, we might have to await cheap flexible plastic displays before e-readers become universal as a reading medium, but I personally suspect that the refinement of the current set of technologies may be sufficient.

Of course the take-up of e-readers is constrained by the distribution systems within which they reside. It is not, at the moment, significantly cheaper to obtain books in electronic than in printed form. I cannot however, see the broken business model of existing publishers surviving long. The market, supported by the relative ease with which entrants can establish themselves, has already proven effective in driving change in the music business, despite recalcitrant commercial incumbents. I have heard it observed of the kindle "I thought I had bought an e-reader and realised I had bought a bookshop". Seen in this light it is difficult to imagine the existing system for book sales remaining intact.

My colleague Claire Warwick argues that the triumph of the e-reader is further off than I believe it to be. She holds the view, backed up by considerably more evidence and scholarship than I can muster, that people are much more conservative with their tools than I give them credit for. But, if anything, writing is a more complex and sensitive than even reading, and word processing or computer mediated writing has with great rapidity almost completely supplanted pen and paper, the very symbol of learning, relegating it to an adjunct role.

I would like to argue that those who believe that the existing system will remain little changed misunderstand the nature of the book. Though reading is certainly a personal and intimate act it is at least as much a social and relational one. Readers engage not only distantly with writers but immediately with friends and others. We read for pleasure but also socially: to engage, to inform, to learn. We share our books, we display our books, we talk about our books. Or at any rate I do.  A book is a tool for thought but it is also a social utility. This has profound implications for the potential for e-readers. Social utilities do not gain ground slowly or incrementally. They grow suddenly, explosively, tipping into rapid expansion once a threshold has been reached. Currently the social dimension of e-readers and e-books are ill developed - no cover, no library, no effective sharing but these are not inherent limitations of the e-reader or even the existing technologies. There are examples of the sort of social services that might form around e-readers.

We are near a tipping point. I expect it will be painful for me. I  retain my affection for my books, and for their smell, feel and physical heft. I will continue, like the audiophile who collects vinyl records, to acquire them but I know this is irrational: a quirk that reflects my age and upbringing. Shoot me if I start saying they are better.