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Saturday 30 August 2014

'The ebook revolution hasn't even begun'

Tim Waterstone has announced the decline of digital books. But there is still so much more they could do, if only publishers were more inventive and less lazy, says Gaby Wood

A 'page' from Mapp Editions' ebook Chile From Within, conceived by publisher Michael Mack with photographer Susan Meiselas
A 'page' from Mapp Editions' ebook Chile From Within, conceived by publisher Michael Mack with photographer Susan Meiselas 

Sir Tim Waterstone, founder of the bookshop chain that bears his name, has announced that ebooks are bound to go into decline. That may happen (anything might). But if it does, I'd suggest it's because publishers have failed to see what ebooks can truly be.

First, let's work out who the protagonists in this drama are, because how we read now is not the same as how we buy. Tim Waterstone is a distinguished bookseller – or he was: call him a bookseller emeritus. Booksellers are the group most threatened by the possible death of the printed book, and they have a reason to think wishfully of the digital book's demise. What we read is dependent on four parties: those who produce the content (writers and other experts or artists); those who polish and package it (publishers); those who sell it (booksellers) and those who consume it (the rest of us). Often, a much-publicised argument about ebooks will in fact be a narrow, panic-based focus on the economic future of one or two of those groups.

But overall, do ebooks do a good job of giving us what we want? Not yet. Do they inspire us, and open our minds to new ways of thinking, as they certainly could? For the most part, no. Early on in the life of the Kindle, digital versions of commercial fiction replaced sales of paperbacks, and publishers had to adapt quickly. As a result, they now tend to think of digital books and printed books as different versions of the same thing. If they really saw the possibilities of the ebook and the virtues of the printed book for what they are, publishers would know the two forms are only very vaguely related.

Some went the other way – produced apps and enhancements that were gimmicky, expensive to produce and difficult to sell. Those ventures were considered failures. But most publishers – especially large ones such as Penguin Random House – are playing it far too safe, lazily pouring pdfs into e-pub files and assuming people will just absorb books how they please, as if a publisher’s job were merely to make things in different colours.

What the problem requires is both more inventiveness and more logic. Independent publishers such as Michael Mack and Faber are leading the way; though they are getting things wrong too, as all experimenters must. There is so much material – visual, historical, musical, vocal – that can bring a text to life digitally. Meanwhile, at the other end of the technological spectrum, old forms of printing are, quite correctly, being revived.

Thinking of ebooks and printed books as comparable is like assuming that anything conveyed by means of the written word is a poem; plays, novels, stories, film scripts, letters, shopping lists and text messages exist too. Publishers have got to stop thinking of their digital products as “books”, and start imagining more expansive ways of communicating information. Until then, the digital revolution hasn’t even begun.

READING THE FUTURE: HOW EBOOKS CAN ENHANCE OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE PAST

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