The future book

This week, Ama­zon unveiled a new line of dig­i­tal con­sump­tion devices under the Kin­dle moniker. Along the way, it may have pro­vided us a view of the future of the book.

A short his­tory of the book

At some point between 7000BC and 4000BC, writ­ing appeared and, along with it came the idea of record keep­ing. Clay tablets then papyrus made such records more portable but required that each record be man­u­ally cre­ated. Mean­while, print­ing popped up in China in 2000BC and South Amer­ica around the same time (Chi­nese had a sys­tem to print on wood while meso-American cul­tures used some kind of loom to “print” using knots). Papyrus was replaced by parch­ment but still required man­ual trans­fers of text, mak­ing books a rare good that gen­er­ally was only avail­able to rich (and there­fore edu­cated) people.

At some point between the 2nd and 4th cen­tury, paper replaced parch­ment and monas­ter­ies start­ing gen­er­at­ing big­ger books, with scrip­to­ri­ums appear­ing in many places. Because of their close ties to the church, the scrip­to­rium mostly pro­duced reli­gious texts. The rise of paper over parch­ment how­ever, made books cheaper, which meant that their dif­fu­sion became some­what wider.

And then it was 1440!

That year, Johan Guten­berg was inspired to com­bine a wine screw (used to press grapes or olives) with paper and hot type to cre­ate the first prit­ing press. Books could now be repro­duced quickly and cheaply, allow­ing for sub­stan­tially lower costs and more wide­spread dis­tri­b­u­tion. The rotary print­ing press was intro­duced in the 19th cen­tury, speed­ing things fur­ther, but apart from that the printed book one gets today is basi­cally pro­duced in the same fash­ion as it was in 1440.

In the 1930s, the paper­back book appeared, mak­ing printed goods a com­plete mass medium. The book world then became strat­i­fied with paper­back at the bot­tom of the pile, aimed at mass dis­tri­b­u­tion, hard­cov­ers in the mid­dle as some­what bet­ter pro­duced and more durable, and col­lectible books, pro­duced in small quan­tity and cre­ated as art objects to be appre­ci­ated by collectors.

Then came e-readers!

The Kin­dle arrives

E-readers were ini­tially a curios­ity, offer­ing new tech­nol­ogy to read books but mostly with­out hav­ing any con­tent on them. But in 2007 Ama­zon, which had already estab­lished a dom­i­nant posi­tion in sell­ing printed mat­ter, unveiled the Kin­dle, an e-reader that had access to a wider col­lec­tion of new titles than any other. The com­pany intro­duced a sec­ond ver­sion in 2009 and the low price of the device, com­bined with access to hun­dreds of thou­sands of books help fire up a new rev­o­lu­tion for books, with read­ers get­ting more inter­ested in the device.

Barnes & Noble, a large Amer­i­can book chain, intro­duced the Nook, a com­pet­ing device that offered e-book read­ing in color, some­thing Ama­zon did not have, as it chose e-ink, a tech­nol­ogy that repro­duces the printed page but is mostly avail­able in black-and-white.

2011 the year the printed book changed

I think future gen­er­a­tions will look at this year as the year the book rad­i­cally changed. Already, the data seems to point to a decline in the sale of paper­back books and trends seem to indi­cate that con­sump­tion of cer­tain book types has moved to e-readers as the pre­ferred form. I was recently chat­ting with a book seller for one of the largest pub­lish­ers in the world and he remarked that thrillers and romance nov­els now sold more widely on e-readers than they did in print. Another per­son recently told me (and a quick check on the New York sub­way con­firmed) that women are the prime users of e-readers right now, with the tablet mar­ket being more male dominated.

So if large seg­ments of the pop­u­la­tion are mov­ing to e-readers, what’s to become of the printed book? Is it the end of the road for some­thing that has existed through most major tech­no­log­i­cal changes? Will cen­turies of his­tory go dig­i­tal? Will future gen­er­a­tions see the lat­est Harry Pot­ter vol­ume in muse­ums, scratch­ing their heads as to why some­one would think of car­ry­ing some­thing as heavy to read it?

Two paths for the book

What I see is some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. I think we’re about to see the book split down two paths and peo­ple will go down one or the other depend­ing on how they feel about books.

Before I look at the two paths, I must high­light that there are two types of book readers:

• On one side are peo­ple who look at the book for its con­tent, only con­cerned with what sto­ries or facts are con­tained within the book. Those peo­ple don’t care about the dis­tinc­tion between paper­back, hard­back, or e-text. What they want is the words and sen­tences, not the other stuff that comes along with the book.  Those peo­ple tend to see books as infor­ma­tion ves­sels to be dis­carded once the infor­ma­tion has been consumed.

• On the other side are peo­ple who look at the book as a total expe­ri­ence, mov­ing from the cover and its lay­out into the book, its size, its type, and finally its con­tent. Those peo­ple look to book as com­plete objects that can­not always move to another form with­out chang­ing. Those peo­ple tend to have larger libraries at home, attach­ing cer­tain time peri­ods and feel­ings to books.  They may pull a par­tic­u­larly worn tome from a shelf and be reminded of the time they acquired it, the time they read it, the peo­ple and loca­tions they fre­quented with that book.

I am not assign­ing judge­ment to either cat­e­gory but I wanted to cre­ate a clear dis­tinc­tion because it has rel­e­vance to what hap­pens next to the book. And let me get into that now:

• Death of the mass mar­ket printed book: I believe the vast major­ity of peo­ple fall in the first cat­e­gory I high­lighted. Look­ing at the trends, it seems that price has gen­er­ally been an issue with books and peo­ple who do con­sume them tend to con­sume them mostly as paper­back. I’d ven­ture that within a gen­er­a­tion, paper­back will dis­ap­pear, and those texts will be mov­ing to e-readers (I’m also assum­ing that e-readers will con­tinue to drop in price until the point where they may be bun­dled with a first pur­chase of a book). This does not bode well for large chains that are sell­ing books as they will see those rev­enue evap­o­rate as more peo­ple move to e-books. In the US, we’ve already seen the death of Border’s book­store and I sus­pect that it’s only a ques­tion of time before Barnes & Noble suf­fers the same fate (unless it adapts and finds a way to sell their nook for sub­stan­tially less than Ama­zon does the Kindle).

• Sur­vival of the book as object: How­ever, the sec­ond group of read­ers will con­tinue to exist and that group is about to go through inter­est­ing times as books become rarer but also more prized. The new­found rise of the book as object is more of a return to the pre-paperback days when libraries were as much sta­tus sym­bol as they were about learn­ing. Books will be pro­duced in sub­stan­tially smaller quan­ti­ties to appeal to this crowd, forc­ing their price up and their mar­gins down. How­ever, authors who are printed will be seen as more influ­en­tial than authors who are only pub­lished digitally.

In the next entry, I will look at some of the impact those changes may have on soci­ety as a whole.