Opening up to the magic of the e-book

The hugely popular Kindle e-reader is on its way to Ireland, and while publishers claim to be unfazed by its arrival, is this the end of the book as we know it?

LOCK UP your books, folks: there’s a new attacker on the loose, and it’s hurtling towards Ireland to devour all your literary loves, its arrival set for some time after October 19th. That’s when Amazon will start shipping the new international version of its massively successful electronic reader, Kindle, now complete with global wireless. And if you believe the rumours, it heralds either the outbreak of a frenzy of reading not seen since Mills Boon hit the tuppenny libraries or the certain demise of the beloved book.

What is this new product that is causing such a stir in the worlds of publishing and print? The Kindle, an electronic reader, or e-reader, is about the size of a paperback novel, which also allows the reader to purchase and download a book at any time, wireless network permitting. Specifically, this must be a book from Amazon’s bank of available Kindle-compatible books, which in Ireland is set to include some 280,000 titles. According to Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, the Kindle can hold 1,500 books, and has a special electronic-ink display that “looks and reads like real paper, without the glare”. Sceptics might point out that real paper already does that, but the Kindle has nonetheless been building a significant fan base in the US, where it was first launched two years ago. Oprah loves hers, Neil Gaiman has been converted, and although Amazon doesn’t release its Kindle sales figures, it does claim that the Kindle is the company’s biggest seller. All indications are that it has already sold in millions.

Sure, there are detractors. Author Nicholson Baker was initially unimpressed. "Here's what you buy when you buy a Kindle book," he wrote in the New Yorkerlast August. "You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon."

Which is another aspect bugging the anti-Kindle brigade: books purchased for your Kindle cannot be lent, sold, or handed on to the next generation after you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil, but are yours and yours alone.

Yet if author and journalist Steven Johnson is to be believed, the Kindle, in conjunction with other e-books, such as the Sony Reader and the iRex iLiad, is likely to "change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways", as he wrote in the Wall Street Journalearlier this year.

Which may be the case, but surely the first ones in the line of fire are not the readers and writers, but the sellers? Given that, according to the Association of American Publishers, US consumers spent $113 million (€76 million) on e-books last year alone, is it time that Irish booksellers got worried?

“I wouldn’t say we’re worried yet,” says Stephen Boylan, books purchasing manager at Eason bookstore. “E-books are still a small part of the market. I don’t think ink and paper books are going anywhere in the near future.”

Boylan even sees an upside to the arrival of the Kindle in Ireland. “I think to get people reading is the aim, and that’s a very positive aspect of the Kindle,” he says.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Boylan can also see drawbacks. “It’s a very interesting product, but from an Irish perspective there are limitations.” He points out that authors such as Ross O’Carroll-Kelly and Cecelia Ahern, along with a number of other bestselling Irish titles, are unlikely to be downloadable on Kindle yet. “Since Ireland has such a great tradition of writers, it’s a shame that some of our biggest writers aren’t available.” On top of this, Irish people still have to order the Kindle online, and have it shipped from the US.

“You miss the local expertise that you get in bookshops,” says Boylan. Then there’s the problem of publishing rights. “There’s a range issue. At the moment you can’t get the new Dan Brown book for the Kindle over here. Sometimes there are different rights issues. Books may have a different publishers in the UK and Ireland than they have in the US.”

YET PUBLISHERSin Ireland appear more than happy to welcome the new arrival.

“I think, in general, publishers are not scared of this,” says Fergal Tobin, publishing director at Gill Macmillan and vice-president of the Federation of European Publishers. “We’re curious . . . but I’m not aware of any sense of panic. On the contrary, most publishers I know are enthusiastically planning for this.”

How is it likely to affect the publishing business? “Nobody knows for sure,” admits Tobin, adding that most feel it will be a boon to professional publishing in areas such as law, accounting, medicine or “any place where you need to keep detailed and voluminous amounts of text”.

Tobin was also involved in a Dublin-based experiment to find out if e-readers could be of benefit in the school environment. The findings? “The current e-readers are insufficiently robust for schoolwork,” he says. “They break. If they can be made more robust . . . you could potentially see the end of the heavy schoolbag problem.”

The burning question is how the general book-buying public will react to the coming of the Kindle. “Conventional wisdom is that a parallel market will develop there: some percentage of the traditional book market will migrate to e-readers.”

Yet the real unknown, according to Tobin, is what the generational split on that percentage is likely to be. “That raises the larger question of patterns and readers and the literacy of young people under 30,” he says. “There is some international evidence of falling patterns of reading generally. In a sense, that’s a separate problem, but it’s a problem that is potentially compounded by things like the Kindle. But is also a problem that is possibly ameliorated by the Kindle, if you can deliver reading to a generation that takes the screen as a default.”

Author Sebastian Barry admits that his children, the eldest of whom is 17, are among those most likely to take to e-books, yet, as a writer, he can also see the appeal.

“There’s a certain magic in it,” he says of the e-book, comparing it to the strangely nebulous existence of a book on a computer before it has been printed and published. “This is also putting books into a further mysterious state, in that you have to make them magically appear. It appeals enormously to my children’s generation because it’s a further instance of a sort of miracle. You just can’t stand in the way of these things.”

In his Wall Street Journalpiece, Johnson predicted that the digitisation of books would mean Google could start ranking individual pages and chapters, which would in turn make writers and publishers "begin to think how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google's results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors".

Barry remains unperturbed, suggesting that as long as literary agents and publishers are ensuring that the rights of writers and readers are protected, there is no need to fear the Kindle’s coming just yet. Added to which, the portability of the Kindle has a particular appeal to a 21st-century lifestyle.

“The freer we seem to be, the faster we seem to be moving,” says Barry. “We need to be able to carry our libraries with us.” And what matter the format if people are reading? “Literally, it’s kindling: you have to get the fire going with something.”

Yet, as Tobin observes, the e-book, for all its technological advances, may still have a hard time beating the original. “You don’t have to be a complete Luddite to acknowledge that the traditional book is actually a brilliant piece of technology,” he says. “It’s flexible, it’s easy to use and, to use an age-old phrase, books do furnish a room.”