Lauren Shantall
The book is dead! Long live the cyber book! Right now, this is merely the kind of conjecture that Web entrepreneurs cling to as they try and convince us that the Internet will revolutionise everything and anything including, in this case, literature. Will the cyber book really reign supreme in the not-too-distant future? Serialised cyber tomes, PalmPilot novels and encrypted e-books are undoubtedly a software step ahead, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re destined to become more popular than regular, printed-on-paper, dead tree-ware “p-books”.
At the moment, cyberspace is losing the reading race. The reason is reader’s block. Even progressive, early adopters are finding it difficult to move away from those tactile, familiar objects we find in bookshops. We do love our p-books: we rhapsodise over the sensuality of flipping the pages, the smell of ink and paper, the cover art, a treasured inscription, a signed first edition … We resist the new cyber versions, remaining stubbornly attached to a form that is itself relatively new.
Only retrogressive Luddites would swop the printing press for a quill and parchment, so why then, in the 21st century, do we want to keep books a few kilometres behind the march of progress? Simply because in this case, the act of consuming literature in an electronic format, however revolutionary, is not the best thing since Gutenberg’s Bible.
Human reading speed is about 25% slower on a computer screen than on the printed page. Most computers, which are non-portable, have 72-dots-an- inch screen resolutions, and until a 300-dpi resolution screen becomes available, computers cannot offer the same clarity as print. Hence the result of a survey by Seybold Research which showed that only 12% of respondents would want to read books off a computer screen.
This situation has been improved by the invention of electronic book readers, like Rocket Book, Glassbook or the Softbook, which came on the market a couple of years ago. These are designed to make reading e-books usually encrypted, downloadable texts you can buy online easier. Most e-book devices have built in back lighting, 105-dpi and glare- resistant screens. Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader software or Microsoft Reader software improves the display by letting you change fonts, enlarge text size as well as search and annotate “pages”. Microsoft’s ClearType triples the resolution of letters on LCD screens, closely mimicking print.
But the high cost of such digital devices is a drawback. The most expensive ones cost about $1 000 in the United States.And while the approximately 1,6-million techno-savvy PalmPilot users can also use their portable organiser as a reading tablet, the Pilot display is tiny and uncomfortable for long reads.
Getting a reluctant readership switched on to a medium that has already been available for a number of years is part of the problem. Digital books failed to achieve mass appeal until heavyweight author Stephen King got wired. King’s Riding the Bullet was released exclusively in digital form and exclusively online.
In July 2000, a few months after his first online success, King launched a self-published e-book The Plant as a pay-per-view download. Although 150 000 readers downloaded the first instalment, the numbers dwindled rapidly to 40 000 by the end of part one. But bear in mind, as King says on The Plant’s website: “The Plant will end up grossing at least $600 000, and may end up over a million. These are not huge numbers in today’s book market, but The Plant pay attention, now, because this is the important part is not a book.”
King has side-stepped providing reasons for what, in some ways, can be seen as an e-publishing disappointment. But maybe he’s right. Perhaps it is futile to compare p-books and e-books. In a few years’ time we just may see the two forms sitting comfortably side-by-side, each with an audience.
Nonetheless, King’s comment does beg the question: If cyber publications are not books, then what, exactly, are they? And how can we measure their success?
A follow-up article will take a look at flops and flyers among South African e-books
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