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Arts
Friday November 20th 2009 www.varsity.co.uk
Arts Editor: Laura Freeman arts@varsity.co.uk
The Book is Dead. Long Live the Book? Does the advent of the e-Reader, the blog, and amazon.co.uk spell the end for the publishing industry? Five bibliophiles ask what the future holds for the slightly foxed paperback.
The Espresso Book Machine I have a recurring nightmare in which I am consumed by a longing, both for the opportunity to buy and consume an espresso and for the means to purchase the hard-to-find G.K. Chesterton classic, The Man Who Was Thursday. I awake wrapped in sweat. I had given up hope of ever sleeping again, until in April I read an article, suggesting that Andrew Hutchings, chief executive of Blackwell, had masterminded a cure. In a move that Hutchings believed “could change bookselling fundamentally”, Blackwell have unveiled an in-house printing service, which makes possible the printing and binding of both freely available digital content and out-of-print texts. Over half a million titles are available. Blackwell print-on-demand service is provided by ‘The Espresso Book Machine’, an industrial laser printer capable of printing around 40 pages per minute, leaving the customer just enough time to grab a titular espresso as their book is created. So has Hutchings cured me? The reality of the print-on-demand phenomenon is still too awkward and frustrating to transform my nightmares into bibliophilic fantasy. Finding a book to print is not straightforward. The customer chooses a title from the selection offered by publishers collaborating with Blackwell; a choice which can be made through the complicated and userunfriendly interface on Blackwell website. When I arrived in Charing Cross, the interface problem becomes apparent. It took ten minutes to find the files, followed by another twenty minutes to print and bind. The machine’s operator was blunt. “Whoever designed this made it difficult to use.” (And didn’t waste time thinking about the aesthetics.) If the title is available online, ordering it from Amazon is cheaper and easier. The online library is an odd, labyrinthine net, replete with manuals for car parts and entomological field guides. The books are not pretty. The binding is very glossy, sticky even. I have my Chesterton novel now, but given the protracted printing process, I drank more than the one espresso. The nightmares are history, but only because I’m totally wired. Print-on-demand is not the future of bookselling. robert thomas
The e-book At the heart of the British Library in London is the King’s Library Tower, an imposing steel-and-glass structure built to house the private library of George III. The Collection, donated to the nation in 1823, holds some 84 000 volumes, including a Gutenberg Bible and Caxton’s first edition of The Canterbury Tales. Tucked away behind this temple to the printed word is a lime green sign welcoming readers to the “virtual bookshelf”, inviting them to “explore the future of reading”. Beneath are four Sony Portable Readers, the company’s latest foray into the burgeoning e-book market. With each device theoretically capable of holding up to 40,000 volumes, these gadgets, no larger than a paperback, could between them store the King’s Library almost twice over. I approached the idea of trialling an e-book with scepticism. I picked up the Reader and tried to read something. Foxed by an admittedly uncomplicated menu, I seemed only to be able to access a table of contents. In German. After a few
minutes of fiddling I did manage to read a few pages of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, tracing my finger across the screen to turn each page and trying to ignore the pixels dissolving and then reappearing to form the words on the screen. It is easier on the eyes than reading from a computer or television screen, but it still doesn’t measure up to the simple joy of flicking through a paperback. It’s all rather cold and unromantic. There was no feeling of excitement as I opened the front cover for the first time (there was no front cover), nowhere to indulge the jealous desire to pen my name onto the first page, to take possession of the book and make it my own. Given that much of the demand for the Kindle, Amazon’s answer to the e-book, is being driven by the romance and erotic romance, one might be tempted to observe that someone looking to read Lori Foster’s Real Men Last All Night would probably feel let down by a battery that doesn’t. Though the number of books available in electronic formats is increasing, there are still considerable gaps in online catalogues. Amazon, for example, offers Rosie: Her Intimate Diaries, “a delicious and voluptuous voyage of
endless arousal” but not Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee’s classic account of a Gloucestershire childhood. If the e-book and the much-hyped Kindle prevail over traditional paperbacks, gone would be the days of lugging hefty tomes from place to place, of being stuck on the beach without a word to read, of trekking through endless corridors in search of a book. But gone too would be the pleasure of browsing dusty bookshops, of third-hand dog-eared paperbacks passed from friend to friend, of small-scale, independent publishers, and of a cultural aesthetic that has taken almost a thousand years to develop. David shone