Books and Technology

Here are a couple of articles I found through the Guardian newspaper's 'Books Blog':

The first is an article written by Michael Bywater about Amazon's Kindle (have one, by the way). In it he discusses some of the product's promising and not-so-promising features, from its capacity to make wireless purchases, to typographical issues, and the loss of reading texture the product seems to herald. He also has some interesting thoughts on what this could mean for the publishing industry, how the wireless aspect of the Kindle might be the thing that saves journalism, and how electronic and print media might actually come to support rather than exclude each other. Link to that article here. (p.s. check out some of the comments posted below the article bemoaning the American-esque 'wit' with which the it is written!)

The second article is about a new piece of technology presented at BEA, aptly named the Espresso. Basically this is a huge machine with a high-speed printer attached at one end, a high-speed color printer at the other, and what it does is print and bind books from electronic files in approximately four minutes a piece. At the end, the book slides out of a little chute at the bottom. This machine is part of a new movement called printing on-demand, which has some promising implications for how the publishing industry responds to supply and demand, and also product availability for the consumer. How many times have you been looking for a particular title or author that wasn't necessarily mainstream enough to make it into the local Barnes and Noble? This machine could easily put an end to all that, although I'm not sure what will happen to the venerable old pastime of browsing, which for me is a pretty important part of the book-buying experience. Anyway, the thing costs about $75,000 and most bookstores are too pinched by the recession to invest in that kind of technology at this point, particularly since there are some kinks that still need to be worked out anyway. Try paper jamming? Read more here.

It seems to me that a lot of the technology surfacing in those industries surrounding books has both promise and risk. True, there are a lot of subtle features of reading that are being threatened. A common analogy is the decline in Album art ever since iTunes basically swept away the CD. But I personally think a lot of those issues are ones that can be resolved as future generations of the products develop, and also by how the markets choose structure themselves. I mean, why can't eBooks make themselves available in different types? And why shouldn't Amazon offer discounts for books that have already been purchased in eBook form, and vice versa? Over all, I think the future for these technologies is promising, and could mean a great reduction in the stress placed by literature on the environment.