A new era is being ushered in by technology... and a new way to read

IT’S no more than a possibility, but a possibility it is, nonetheless.

It is possible that this is the year – even more precisely, that this is the summer – which, a few centuries from now, will be seen as the watershed between the past and the future, which ushered in a new era, which changed the process of thought, study and leisure for centuries to come.

If the proposition turns out to be accurate, then the big change agent won’t be the economic meltdown, although that may be a minor player on the sidelines. Nor will it be the property crash, which won’t, retrospectively, be seen be as even a bit player. It will be the sudden confluence of technology and market which has always characterised major shifts in the way we live and learn and think.

More immediately important events will happen this year, there’s no doubt about that, the continuing tragedy of the Pakistan floods chief among them, although to witness the much greater attention paid by the Western world to a matronly oddball turfing a cat into a wheelie bin and dropping the lid on it you’d be forgiven for believing that the Pakistan floods had receded and their dire consequences had all been solved.

But then, while murder, rape, pillage, plague and wars were all going on the year Gutenberg invented the printing press, none of them changed the future the way he and the machine he developed did.

In the same way, this year may have marked the shift from buying books printed on paper and enclosed between hard or soft copies, and downloading them the way most music is now downloaded. In the first half of last year in the United States electronic book sales accounted for less than 3% of overall book sales. This year, in the corresponding period, they’d grown to nearly 9%, and that was before the arrival of the iPad, with its promise of more pleasurable book-reading on the go.

The figures for the latter half of this year? Nobody can guess. However, a number of factors point to acceleration of electronic book purchasing. One of those factors is the reduction in price. When I bought the Sony bookreading device two years ago, it cost just under €400. Now, that has halved, as has the price of Amazon’s equivalent. Just as price has fallen, choice has widened. Barnes&Noble now have their own device, called the Nook, the more expensive version of which (still only about $188) acts as its own electronic outreach service, accessing and downloading a book in 60 seconds without the intervention of an internet-enabled computer or mobile phone.

Sears have an even cheaper hand-held book reader, which they claim is easy to use even in harsh sunlight, and which comes with a hundred free books pre-loaded. The majority of these are undoubtedly classics on which the copyright has long run out, leaving them up for grabs in the public domain.

While a work by Wharton or Dickens or Hardy may not be of much interest to a neophiliac, the fact remains that for even the most active reader, a hundred books, fee gratis and for nothing, represents a full year’s literary consumption. Which, for a price of roughly 80 quid is bargain basement, when you consider that the purchaser, in addition to getting those one hundred books, also buys the capacity to download the new titles emerging from today’s publishers at considerably less in cost terms than the old fashioned book-in-hand version of the same work.

Another advantage is that the purchaser can store several thousand books on the tiny unit forever and a day. (Or at least until they lose it, or, has happens so often to mobile phones, drop it into the loo.) Those of us who love to be surrounded by shelves loaded with familiar titles may mourn the sensual add-ons to the reading experience subtracted by electronic readers, but it is possible that a reversal of the current book-buying process may come about in response to that affection for the physical sensation of the heft of a good hardback. Readers may read many books electronically and then go to a bookshop where a printed and bound version of a few they have decided upon as favourites may be run off.

That would make environmental sense. Transporting books around the world, singly or in dozens, has an appallingly large carbon footprint.

ALTHOUGH bookaholics hate the idea that 3,000 books which might otherwise be shelved in their home can now be found on a device thinner than the average paperback, we can be pretty sure that bookaholics just a couple of centuries ago hated the abolition of the chains locking their book in the library or their newspaper in the club to the wall. Where sentimental twenty first century readers may love the smell of a new book and the soft susurration of page-turning, you can bet some of the lads in times past loved the clanking of chains as an accompaniment to their morning read.

Not that it’s the readers who are currently suffering panic attacks. These are reserved for the publishers and the bookshops.

American publishers have had a shot sent across their bows by the Wylie literary agency, where someone copped on that the publishing contract for books commissioned and published up to relatively recently did not tend to specify who owned the electronic publishing rights for the very good reason that nobody had imagined the possibility. According to the New York Times, Andrew Wylie, “frustrated with the terms that traditional publishers were offering for ebook rights, persuaded some of his existing clients or their estates to transfer the rights of their backlist titles to Odyssey”.

Odyssey is the electronic book publisher he had decided to tack on to his literary agency, which, he announced at the beginning of the summer, would bring out Lolita in electronic form, as well as several other major titles.

Publishers, understandably, went bananas. Random House stopped doing business with the agency, which in turn made many of its 700 clients go bananas. Last week, Random House and the Wylie Agency resolved their differences, and although neither side wanted to share the details of the resolution, it looks as if the literary agent backed down.

That backing down will have solved the problems of the publishers, at least in the short term, but it leaves the bookshops looking grimly into a future where the committed book browser who loves to spend time in bookshops, prowling the aisles looking at title and authors’ names and eventually leaving with a bag full of printed promise, may cease to exist in significant numbers.

This has led to some “serve them right” sniggering, as readers remember how small bookshops were crushed, over the past couple of decades, by the big chains. Those same chains are now scrambling to come up with ways to continue to draw customers who can electronically buy a book they fancy within minutes of reading a review of it.

What worries me is the possibility that what we’ll laughingly call my brain may respond to ebooks the way it has responded to the BlackBerry: by forgetting what’s stored in the handheld. Bad enough not to know one’s own telephone number. Worse, to forget great literary lines on the basis that they can be quickly retrieved from a gadget.