With the Digital Publishing New Zealand Forum’s Future of the Book seminar on at the moment, it’s prompted me to think more about e-books and digital publishing and the way these are presented by the media and digital  publishers.

I have to admit to a bias straight off – I’m not a big fan of e-books, or the idea of e-books or how they are currently presented and discussed.  One thing I’m particularly tired of seeing is the stories by mainstream media that constantly revolve around the “E-books kill off books” theme (see two recent stories in the NZ Herald and on TV3)  even when the participants/interviewees in these stories are not pushing that angle. No, the book is not dead. The media have run with these stories for at least 10 years, along with the reviews that present the shortcomings of e-books and e-book readers – shortcomings such as high price, badly designed hardware and downloading difficulties (speed in the old days, location in the present),  which have not been fully addressed or finessed by either digital book publishers or digital book hardware producers in 10 years – a couple I found were the Engadget Kindle DX review or C.Net blogpost on Kindle (the comments are particularly interesting)  or from The Independent . Imagine if the first iPods came out 10 years ago and we will still complaining about the same problems with every new version?

While I’m on this particular rant can we stop with the ebook-book/CD-vinyl record comparisons? Books have been around at least 600 years (if you only want to date them to the invention of moveable type in Europe) and so e-books are up against at least 600 years of appeal, love and history – which slightly skews that comparison.

E-books and digital publishing will be huge, I have no doubt. It will change the way a lot of people read, but it won’t happen in a simple “replacement for physical books” way. I see e-books being much more revolutionary for libraries and for magazines and newspapers, and having far more effect on the publishing “bestseller” list. And until both publishers and hardware producers address the dissonance between the gadget side  and the reader side of this debate and find a way to reconcile the two, it seems to me their hardware will always fail.

Yes, I’m biased, but so far the voice of the reader side seems to me to have been missing to a large extent in the public arena of the debate, but go to a bookstore or a book fair, or talk to a book collector and many of them will say “I like the idea of an e-book reader, it sounds cool, but it will never replace books because I love them” and will proceed to go off into raptures of the little things of a book that a Kindle (for example) doesn’t replicate – smell, feel, page turning/flipping, cover design, typography design. Do digital publishers understand the this love? Do they want to?

And finally, this quote from author Joe Meno sums up for me why the melding of books and technology needs to be approached differently and why the current debate seems to be creating a lot of tension and anxiety (here’s one extreme example from author Sherman Alexie).

“The more I write, the more I’ve come to realize that books have a different place in our society than other media. Books are different from television or film because they ask you to finish the project. You have to be actively engaged to read a book. It’s more like a blueprint. What it really is, is an opportunity… A book is a place where you’re forced to use your imagination. I find it disappointing that you’re not being asked to imagine more.”

P.S. In part this rant was prompted by a post on the great Bookman Beattie blog - thanks for keeping us updated with the seminar!