I Like to Read: Past, Present and Future

One time, shortly after my sister was born, I gave my parents a fright by disappearing for several hours. At the time, I figured with all the hullabaloo about the new baby no one would miss me heading off to entertain myself. I was 10, I had a bike and an afternoon to myself. I'm not sure what horrible, perhaps criminal scenarios entered my parents' minds at the time - maybe they imagined me loitering at the mall, vandalizing neighborhood property, doing drugs/alcohol, trespassing on some abandoned industrial building or somesuch. Alas, I was a much nerdier delinquent than that.

I had gone for a luxurious visit at the local library. I spent hours poring over my favorite sections, doing as thorough a sampling as my attention span would allow of the authors I hadn't read yet in the mystery and sci-fi/fantasy categories. A kid's bike and a healthy anxiety around traffic could only get me so far on my afternoon of freedom. But at the library - the books there could get me to so many more places and situations! When I got home I got in big trouble. (Hey, I was even home in time for dinner.) But it remains a cherished and amusing childhood memory for me.

My family still teases me today about my reading appetite. But their teasing is a little less warranted these days. I only get a chance to read books on vacation or any flights where I know I'll have a lot of waiting around to do. I'm far too easily distracted with gadgetry (computer, PS3, iPod, and other shiny, powered objects) to pick up a book in my daily life.


Come to think of it, most (but certainly not all) of what I'm trying to do on such gadgets is read. Web content provides me news, further information on my latest obsessions, gadget reviews, troubleshooting guides, a whole slew of opinions ranging from well-informed to comedic. Not only can I search for any of these things, I also have choices of sources when I find them.

Right before Christmas, Lee got an Amazon Kindle as a company gift. When I first heard of the e-reader idea, I was skeptical although I'm not entirely sure why. I'm fine with reading on gadget screens and being able to cart around an entire library of books in the size of a single book seems like a fantastic idea. It would make vacation packing easier. I think now it was probably more of a knee jerk reaction to changing the way I've always interacted with books. Despite my love of gadgets, I'm not an early adopter type; I prefer that new things have been proven out for a bit before I latch on.

Now that I've had a chance to interact with the Kindle, I'm less skeptical. I probably wouldn't mind one of my own so I don't have to distract Lee with a Terry Pratchett paperback so I can read a book on the Kindle. In the meantime, Lee was happy enough to share his new toy.

It's roughly trade paperback size and comes in a leather case that makes it look like a Moleskine notebook when closed. It turns out that the case actually helps make it usable. Buttons span the length of both sides where you would conceivably grasp it. And since very few people tend to stick their thumbs on the screen they're trying to read, it makes for some accidental page turning when you first pick it up. This layout makes the case the only thing you can comfortably grasp without hitting buttons. I think they're fixing this in the next generation device.

The Kindle is based on e-paper technology which is much easier on the eyes than the typical computer screen. The text is dark grey on a light grey background - not quite the black ink on paper look but a pretty comfortable approximation. There were a few times I was so engrossed in the story that I forgot I was reading on the Kindle and looked for a page to turn instead of a button to push. The font size is adjustable on the fly. It uses advanced cell phone network to download the things you want to read, both pretty quickly and with no need to find a Wifi hotspot. You can download books from Amazon's store, subscribe to newspapers, blogs and probably some other stuff I haven't thought of using it for. Buying is linked to your Amazon account - so you don't have to fiddle with entering transaction data on the Kindle (even though it's got a keyboard). Battery life is excellent. The e-paper technology doesn't consume power to merely display the image on the screen, only when it changes the image on the screen. As a matter of fact, when you turn it "off" it puts up a random literary image. During a 2 week trip over the holidays, it was charged only once and even then it was more of a due diligence act rather than really needing it.

How will these e-readers affect how we read books in the future? With Amazon, a main-stream distributor and store, and Sony, one of the largest electronics manufacturers jumping into the fray, the e-reader has definitely entered general consciousness. It's still an expensive gadget, but within the same range as Apple's iPods. Will books end up like vinyl records - accessible and wanted only by the uber bibliophiles? People have been predicting a similar destiny for newspapers for some time now and indeed, the newspaper industry has been struggling and making cutbacks for years in an effort to stay alive.

I think we'll still have books on paper in the long run. In the vinyl record/book analogy, I think there's one important distinction. With music, each format needs a player to enjoy the content. Vinyl records need turntables, CDs need CD players and mp3s need mp3 players. E-books need an e-reader. However, books in their current printed form don't need a specific gadget to deliver content. Nor do they need battery power. I think that alone will stave off any pending demise. It's actually easier to consume book content in its current form than the new, emerging form. But as e-readers, handheld computers (Blackberrys, iPhones, Google phones of the future) become more prevalent, the issue of ease of consumption changes. On the other hand, it's easier for content providers to provide many copies of content (books) in electronic form than in physical form. If the money starts coming from electronic content rather than physical content, that's where the providers will focus their efforts.

Which brings me to the other side of the equation: the source of the reading content. With the internet came the advent of the new information model. It used to be only a few providers would funnel information, entertainment, etc. through to the masses. Compared to the numbers of consumers of such information, such providers were very few. Only the few television networks, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses could provide content to the masses. If you wanted to get out your message, you needed to go through these gatekeepers to access the consumers. The internet has changed that to open up the content sources to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. Youtube serves up user created mini-movies. Wikipedia serves up definitions of people, places, things as defined by many people. Bloggers have served up everything from news to opinions to obscure hobbies and much more. Self-publication in terms of providing electronic reading content is trivial. There is a button at the bottom of this Blogger window that says "Publish Post". Obviously I've hit that by now, or you wouldn't be reading these words on my little blog.

Self-publishing has been encroaching into the book publishing world as well. Many authors, frustrated with the process of trying to get agents to represent them to publishing houses and possessing a lot of self-promotional enthusiasm and skills, have published small runs of their own work and sold them to book stores. A small percentage of these self-published authors have garnered enough attention that a publisher decided it wasn't so risky to take them on and publish their work in larger runs. Which seems like a win-win situation. The book publishing business isn't particularly lucrative in the average book's life. Obviously, at the Harry Potter level of bookselling, there's a lot more money. But that's more of a dream realized every once in a while rather than the norm. Agents and publishers wade through thousands of manuscripts searching for the next Harry Potter and are unwilling to risk publishing and advertising costs to something that will sell only hundreds of copies. Which makes the chances of getting published seem miniscule. Authors who have taken on the cost of that initial small publication and advertising and have proven successful enough to gain a wider audience represents less of a risk for the publisher.

Common wisdom among author wannabes is that self-publication doesn't get authors street cred. "You're not a real author until someone else has judged your work and deemed it worthy of publication." But recently, I talked to a fellow Nanowrimo writer who had attended a writer's conference. She told me that there were some agents at the conference who expressed the opinion that self-publication may be a legitimate future for the book publishing industry. So perhaps this common wisdom is softening and turning around.

Which brings me back to Amazon and their Kindle adjunct system, the Digital Text Platform where anyone with an email address and SSN can publish their work to be bought on the Kindle. They don't charge you for publishing, but they need a bank account to deposit your earnings into. I plan on looking into this system more closely if/when I have work that I feel would warrant digital publication. Perhaps even multiple things that would warrant publication. After all, if a reader likes an author, they tend to want to read more things by that author. At least I do. Judging by my content producing pace (glacial), it might be good for me to have a couple things ready in that happy event people actually like my novel/writing to want to read more.

Regardless of what format my reading takes, I know I'll still hopelessly be addicted to it in the future, even if I write my own stories in order to read something!