YOU鈥橵E heard it all before. Pundits have been predicting the death of books for almost a century. First it was the novelty of moving pictures that was going to kill them off. Then the coming of radio and TV. And when that didn鈥檛 do the trick, computers and the Internet came along to deliver the killer blow. Well, books are still with us. But for how much longer?
Books as we know them are beginning to feel the squeeze from all sides. Publishers are releasing more and more texts in electronic form-on CD-ROM or the Internet and e-reader devices are taking off everywhere. 鈥淓lectronic paper鈥� is finally a reality, too-thin, light and flexible, but instantly refreshable to let you download the latest news or novel. No one is sure yet what final form the e-book will take, or just when it will take over, but it鈥檚 becoming clear that the way we read is set to change forever.
The coming of the e-book has been trumpeted since the 1980s, when computers invaded our homes and the media started to get excited by their potential impact on the printed word. Suddenly, a single PC could store the text of thousands of books in a form that could be swapped on disc or sent across the world on the fledgling Internet.
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By the early 1990s, people were able to visit online libraries such as the pioneering Project Gutenberg, a massive repository of free, non-copyright texts. Its first big hit was Alice in Wonderland, and millions of downloads later the project expects to have 20,000 books online by the end of this year.
The major turn-off with e-books, however, has been the discomfort of reading large amounts of text from a PC screen. If you get much beyond a few paragraphs of type, most people print it out, Bill Gates recently told an audience at Microsoft鈥檚 headquarters. 鈥淚t defeats the idea of immersive reading.鈥� Even the arrival of lightweight laptop computers hasn鈥檛 helped much. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like having a cat perched on your lap on a hot summer鈥檚 day,鈥� complains Bill Hill, a researcher with Microsoft鈥檚 eBook Group.
The problem has prompted several companies to come up with specialised hand-held readers-devices that are about the same size as the average novel but with electronic memories and monochrome screens. And multipurpose hand-helds such as Palm鈥檚 PDAs can also be used to read e-texts.
In response to the proliferation of these e-book readers, mainstream publishers such as Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster are joining the fray with splashy e-book announcements. Like record companies before them, they appear to be waking up to both the promise and the threat of digital media, heeding predictions that within a few years, we鈥檒l all be opting for electronic versions of newspapers, magazines and books. Industry analyst Forrester believes that by 2005, e-books will account for one-sixth of the US book-publishing market-some $7.8 billion. US-based analyst Accenture is more conservative, but still puts the figure at $2.3 billion by the same date.
To most of us these numbers seem as fanciful as a Harry Potter novel. More than half the publishers surveyed by Forrester don鈥檛 yet offer a single e-book title. And despite author Stephen King鈥檚 success with his online-only story Riding the Bullet- which attracted more than 400,000 downloads in 48 hours-King鈥檚 next attempt, an electronic serial novel, flopped. Meanwhile the most successful of the specialised e-book readers on the market, Gemstar鈥檚 two devices, had sold fewer than 60,000 by this time last year when Gemstar executives predicted they would be selling millions of the gadgets.
Perhaps these disappointing figures aren鈥檛 so surprising, given the limitations of today鈥檚 e-book readers. These things cost more than 拢100, their batteries last a matter of hours and they have tiny screens that become almost unreadable in bright sunlight. What鈥檚 more, publishers can鈥檛 even settle on a standard file format, so no one machine can display text from every publisher. After paying a price the equivalent of 30 paperback novels, e-book fans have to grapple with downloads that can come in any number of formats: Gemstar鈥檚 proprietary formats, Adobe鈥檚 PDF, Microsoft鈥檚 eReader, or plain ASCII text.
Consumers often complain that the publishers themselves are to blame. Many e-books, despite their cheap digital format, cost as much as hardbacks, even though manufacturing and distribution costs of an e-book are negligible compared with its print equivalent. This gives book buyers no incentive to go electronic. It鈥檚 a deadlock that has yet to be broken, as timid publishers discouraged by the lack of success so far aren鈥檛 offering a broad enough choice for most consumers. Gemstar offers the widest range of titles, about 4000, but that鈥檚 nothing compared with the hundreds of thousands available in any local library or bookshop.
Royalties are another issue on which the battle has only just begun. In a recent court decision in the US, small e-book publisher RosettaBooks won the right to negotiate separate e-book rights with writers Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron, even though big-name publisher Random House had already negotiated print rights to their titles.
Authors also worry that their texts may be pirated and swirl across the Web for free. 鈥淭he issues are exactly the same as they would be with online music,鈥� says Clare Griffiths, a lawyer at intellectual-property firm Briffa in London. You can see why they are worried. British Internet-monitoring company Envisional recently claimed that nearly 7500 illegal electronic texts are available online, with books by Stephen King, J. K. Rowling and Terry Pratchett the favourite targets. Encryption and watermarking technologies designed to protect digital material have yet to prove they are up to the challenge, as demonstrated by the much-publicised case of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov, who cracked the code used to protect Adobe鈥檚 e-book files. Another programmer claims to have cracked Microsoft鈥檚 eReader format.
Yet many analysts see such worries as mere details. According to Rebecca Ulph, an analyst with Forrester in London, e-books will find their first big market in universities: for textbooks and reference materials such as dictionaries and databases. They鈥檙e searchable and updatable, she says, 鈥渁nd much more flexible in this format鈥�.
The University of Virginia is already running courses for which students are required to have their textbooks on e-book readers. And the University of Phoenix is encouraging students to switch to goReaders, aiming for textbook-free learning. The state of Maine is giving a laptop to every school student and shifting coursework and texts to electronic formats. Several online content-management companies such as NetLibrary and WizeUp have deals with textbook publishers to offer e-books, while a division of publisher Thomson Learning is going to offer half its list in e-book form. Forrester predicts that by 2005, a quarter of all university textbooks will be electronic.
By then, the market may well have been softened up by the mainstream publishers. They have begun to target e-books at the Game Boy generation, for whom hand-held e-book readers may not be so alien. AOL Time Warner is releasing 200 e-books geared towards children, Random House has teamed up with Sesame Street, and Simon & Schuster is preparing e-books for the 鈥測oung adult鈥� market.
But many smart people in the e-publishing industry are realising that stiff, tablet-style readers are never going to be a match for paper. It鈥檚 a phenomenally successful medium: tough, easy to read, and just as good on the beach in bright sunshine as in semi-darkness. Its look and feel are unique. It鈥檚 ultra-light and it doesn鈥檛 need batteries. What can compete with that?
The answer is e-paper, the technology that is promising to be crucial in the rise of the e-book. E-paper will sweep away people鈥檚 reluctance to read on-screen, predicts Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology鈥檚 Media Lab. 鈥淚t will look and feel like paper, but be a refreshable computer display,鈥� he says. And it鈥檚 here already.
More than two years ago, IBM set up a partnership with MIT to develop a prototype hand-held newsreader. They used an e-paper, first developed at MIT, composed of sheets of flexible plastic film lined with transparent microcapsules, each containing a mix of black dye and tiny white spheres. Apply a voltage across the capsules and the white spheres rise to the surface, turning the surface white. Switch the voltage so the dye is on top and it appears black. Each capsule is controlled by electrodes connected to tiny flexible transistors. The whole array is battery-powered and controlled by a simple processor chip. Add in a wireless Internet connection and you can download novels, news stories or text whenever and wherever you want (see Diagram).
鈥淚 don鈥檛 think there鈥檚 any question of whether these things will become available. It鈥檚 just how long it will take,鈥� says Bob Steinbugler, head of IBM鈥檚 strategic design group based in Maryland. 鈥淓verything has been proven in the lab, but the path to commercialisation is painfully slow,鈥� he says.
Steinbugler isn鈥檛 the only one who believes you鈥檒l soon be reading an e-paper version of John Grisham鈥檚 latest. Two teams are actively developing their own versions of e-paper: a Xerox spin-off called Gyricon Media, and a consortium led by Lucent Technologies and Massachusetts-based company E Ink.
Joe Jacobson, a physicist at MIT鈥檚 Media Lab, and one of the creators of E Ink鈥檚 e-paper, has little doubt that it will be everywhere by the time his young daughter goes to college. E Ink is already selling flexible signs made of e-paper and has opened a plant near Boston to manufacture the flexible microelectronics required. It hopes to have a full-colour version available in a few years. Soon, Jacobson believes, the stuff will be as bright and readable as paper (New 杏吧原创, 15 May 1999, p 36).
Negroponte, too, has little doubt that electronic paper will be the breakthrough medium. 鈥淚f it is inexpensive enough, we鈥檙e sure to find multiple sheets of e-paper bound into an e-book-which might well have a leather cover and back.鈥� So the e-book could end up resembling your favourite hardback after all, but with the added advantage that it can be refreshed with instant downloads from the Internet. What will be different is the way you use it.
When paper goes digital, reading will acquire an entirely new dimension. Already, E Ink has demonstrated that its prototype e-paper can display video and graphics as well as text. This kind of technology will eventually allow people to enter dynamic, virtual narratives and even to become characters themselves. 鈥淭here will be new ways to represent a story,鈥� says Negroponte. 鈥淣ew displays will include means to be immersive. Holographic video and other means of display will emerge.鈥�
Technology is already opening new doors for literary experimentation. Literary hyper-text is a cutting-edge genre based on the ability of computers to allow readers to move through works in entirely new ways. Writers such as Michael Joyce use hypertext links to slide readers back and forth through often elusive narratives that never read the same way twice.
Hypertexts are constructed as a series of screen-sized blocks of text known as 鈥渓exias鈥�. They usually contain one or more links that take readers elsewhere in the narrative, and some lexias cannot be read before others. 鈥淲e are out on a technical edge and an artistic edge because we hope and believe this is where the world is going,鈥� says Mark Bernstein of hypertext publisher Eastgate.
Janet Murray, professor of information design and technology at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, is also intrigued by the possibilities of virtual reality and narrative. She believes that readers might one day walk into a specially programmed room lined with video displays or even e-paper, similar to the holodeck on Star Trek, and find themselves dropped into the midst of David Copperfield or William Gibson鈥檚 Neuromancer.
You might even end up in a soap opera, if a project called 鈥淭oward the Holodeck鈥� at the University of Salford near Manchester takes off. Ruth Aylett, professor of intelligent virtual environments, has been studying how narrative could be transposed into a virtual world. This is more complex than you might think, she says, because the author鈥檚 control-the script-goes out the window. The virtual narrative has to react to an autonomous character whose motives, moves and intentions it cannot predict, and adjust the storyline on the fly.
Creating a holodeck environment at home is not far off, Aylett believes. Once flat-screen or e-paper displays become wall-sized, 鈥測ou could project your 3D scene all around you, so you鈥檇 have your holodeck in the living room鈥�.
But let鈥檚 not get too carried away with the technology, Negroponte warns. After all, if e-paper or the holodeck do take over from the book, we鈥檒l probably stop noticing them anyway. 鈥淓ventually all successful storytelling technologies become transparent. We lose consciousness of the medium and see neither print nor film but only the power of the story itself,鈥� writes Murray in her book Hamlet on the Holodeck. 鈥淚f digital art reaches the same level of expressiveness as these older media, we will no longer concern ourselves with how we are receiving the information. We will only think about what truth it has told us about our lives.鈥�