These are interesting times for those who value and embrace the intellectual potential of the written word. With the advent of the e-book, an entire library can be carried around on a laptop unit a little larger than a single paperback. Whilst the tacit sensual joy of the book with its cover design, back cover blurb and physically turnable pages, like small doors to new rooms, cannot be denied, this new world desire for substance in the virtual will have their wants met.
With Google and Apple moving towards a hard driveless world through their various Cloud innovations and silent solid state drives with no moving parts, anything remotely bulky and of physical value is as desirable as a syringe shot of bacillus anthracis.
Imagine, if you will, a future where all that is vital to satisfy the demands of the consumer is the ability to meet an annual subscription fee for your 'one service' account and ID. The tangible joys of life will be restricted to increasingly rare opportunities for human contact, and, perhaps, places for the consumption of food. The leisure industry will almost certainly have its work cut out providing new ideas to oil its wheels as we retreat to the mind away from the body. The joy of language and an escape from feeble assimilation will be hunted out like the spoils of sinful acts. With an abominable sack of new unmediated texts, quality and diversity will take on all the status of literary accidents. The critic will return, their words worth a thousand pages, as good writing gets recommended and vanity verbiage is put in the trash on the bottom right of the screensaver.
So who will be the first recognised empirical lords of the new e-book dynasty? They are already upon us. Darcie Chan is now a publishing sensation, selling 400,000 e-book copies of her debut novel ‘The Mill River Recluse’, her imagery now upon the pages of nearly half a million kindles, even though it has yet to achieve a print run. In less than five years, newspapers, the Guardian's Alan Rusbridger tells us, will be available only as the virtual fruit of iPad subscriptions. Tomorrow's reading will only be associated with touch through the tap tap tapping of the touch sensitive keyboard.
As for mmx e-books and the so-called interactive reading experience, nothing can provide us with a realistically genuine substitute for the incredibly solitary process of taking on a giant page-turning literary thriller. You cannot read a book with someone, and as we enter the world alone, so shall we leave it. Nothing in life is quite as deliciously private as the reading of a book, and only the e-book amongst everything new on the literary scene carries that quality.
It is for that reason alone that I predict the continued and growing success of the e-book, and with the onset of solar powered kindles, we have not even to fear the end of the world’s power supply. Reading, and all the books that promote it, will survive.
M J Godleman
January 2012
