If you are selling ebooks, I'm a hard
sell. For one thing, my enthusiasm for traditional books is just
this side of pervy. I live among mountains of them and always have,
among the most beautiful mass-produced objects of all time. Some of
my most treasured possessions are broken-backed, scribbled-in,
jacketless books first read when a teenager; they've lasted longer
than merely human friends. One variation of bliss is a low, soft
armchair with decent light and several hundred well-written pages
to wallow in. I like it that, with all these warnings of electronic
smog, books don't plug in, beep or suddenly produce pop-ups. They
are pleasingly silent and dignified, there when needed, discreet
and patient.
I like certain paperbacks - those old Penguins, the Picadors of my
youth - but hardbacks remain the most sensually attractive, good
cloth covers - powder blue, or cream, preferably - and thick, matt
paper and a classic typeface in dark ink. Illustrations? Yes,
please, but not too many. When I eventually become a nasty-minded,
dribbling old man I'm sure I will be found creeping round
second-hand bookshops, sniffing the produce, snuffling with
pleasure.
If, that is, the bookshops are still there, and have not been
put out of business by ebooks - digital versions that can be read
on computers or hand-held devices. But I'm a sceptic. A very long
time ago, 10 years or more, I vividly remember being at Davos for
the rich-or-clever people's annual frolic in the snow, and being
assured that epaper - "electronic paper" - was about to transform
the way we read. There was a minor frenzy of excitement about this
stuff, being developed by MIT in the States and the big electronics
firms. Here was an electronic display that could be rolled up and
stuck in your pocket. Soon, I was told, we would all be using it to
download our newspapers and books at railway stations, or wherever.
There were articles back then about the death of the book, and the
death of paper. They have been coming ever since. And yet, for most
of us, the ebook has never arrived.
Why? After all, most of us are broadband-connected, getting more
and more information from websites, accustomed enough to reading
screens of one kind or another. Many of us download more music than
we buy from shops in CD form, and the same will soon be true of
films. We are starting to use online versions of newspapers; and I
have the BBC's news online flickering in the corner much of the
time. It has probably become my number-one source of news, ahead of
the telly or radio bulletins. So why the tortoise progress of the
ebook?
It's partly that traditional books are such good technology,
even compared with CDs or newspapers. They are a little larger than
the hand, extremely portable, nice to hold and look at and
remarkably cheap. Yes, there is an environmental issue but most are
made of cheap, sustainable woodpulp. Simple technology that works
is unlikely to go out of fashion. Those futurologists of the 1960s
who predicted a world of silver jumpsuits and food-pills forgot
that socks, buttons and saucepans were simple technology that
worked, and the same is true of books.
Beyond that, most ebook readers simply aren't good enough,
whether they're dedicated devices or the multi-purpose palmtop
computers made by the likes of Palm and Hewlett-Packard. They're
fine to use for an hour or two when you are sitting upright in even
indoor light, but they're pretty useless when you are travelling,
sitting in the garden or slumped in the bath. The ebook reader that
is as easy on the eye as a real book, and as quick to flick
through, and as portable, hasn't arrived.
Or perhaps it has. Enter Sony's Reader and iRex's Iliad, which
are being touted as the first really useable, easy-to-read
products. I've had an Iliad for a month to try out. It costs £449
plus VAT, or slightly more with a handsome leather case that makes
it look like a slightly larger, thinner Filofax. I have not been
offered one for free, nor would accept that. So it has been a fair,
straightforward trial: bibliophile, or perhaps bibliomaniac, meets
book-killer.
I should say, at the outset, that Iliad's British champion, who
has been immersed in the project since the idea first occurred to
him on holiday with his wife in Rome two years ago, denies that it
is a book-killer. Peter Blanchard, who found that iRex was already
ahead of him, is an expatriate Scouse engineer and management
connsultant now throwing himself into the ebook revolution from the
unlikely setting of a Welsh hilltop. He sees it as a handy,
portable tool that can accommodate novels and other books,
certainly, but also newspapers, work notes, jottings and so on. The
one that was sent to me already had downloaded on to it four books
by Arthur Conan Doyle, two Brontë novels, 10 by Dickens, four
apiece by George Eliot and DH Lawrence, three Dostoevskys, James
Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses, Jane Austen's
complete works, and ditto Lewis Carroll, both big fat Tolstoys,
five Thomas Hardy novels and quite a lot of poetry. That's a hefty
bookshelf, accommodated in a device only a little over a centimetre
thick and in breadth and depth about the size of a closed hardback
book.
It is meant to be read, at length, and its claim is that the
screen is good enough to allow you to read, even a Tolstoy, even in
sunlight, and actually enjoy the experience. It works with a basic
menu, four buttons separated into news (of which more anon), books,
docs and notes. There is a small pen-like stylus attached to the
back, which lets you make notes or add comments to your documents
and - the best innovation - a thin silver bar on the left of the
screen that you flick with your thumb to turn the pages. It is
charged, like a laptop, mobile or any other similar device, and the
battery should see easily you through a day's reading and writing.
For those interested in detailed specifications, I can say it
weighs about the same as a medium-sized banana. It powers up
quickly and turns off easily.
Here is the first crucial thing: the screen does work. By
"work", I mean that the words stand out clearly without shimmering,
and that you can certainly read it outside, in dappled light and
direct sunlight, as you would not be able to read a normal computer
screen. The effect is matt, not shiny, and black-and-white, not
colour. Well, to be precise, not black-and-white so much as dark
grey characters on a light grey background, which is perhaps part
of the secret. The font is modern - not elegant, but effective -
and you get far fewer words to the "page" than with a traditional
book, though the half-inch borders and generous spacing between
paragraphs help you to read. I tried it, reading some Tolstoy and
then some Conan Doyle, in the garden, slumped in a chair inside, on
a sofa in a dimmish room, and in the back of a car. In each place,
it was easy to read; I have spent plenty of time reading it and so
far, haven't felt any eyestrain, or no more than I would have found
with a book.
What about page-turning? It is slower than a book. There is a
distinct "one-and-two" count as the page dissolves and re-forms
after your thumb has touched the flicker, and it can be
disconcerting. I found it more cumbersome than turning a page.
Speeding this up will be important if the ebook is to really catch
on. There is a scroll-bar on the bottom of the page, and with the
stylus you can jump to different parts of the book, but again this
is slower than the real thing, and obviously you can't turn over
the corners of pages - electronic bookmarks are, we're promised, on
the way. Ebooks have many more pages than their paper equivalents
(because each page holds so few words), and I found myself wishing
for better and more readily searchable indexes and contents. Again,
though, this is probably a wrinkle that will be sorted.
For me, the most important moment came reading a Sherlock Holmes
story when I suddenly realised I'd been following the tale for
several minutes having completely forgotten about the Iliad itself.
This, of course, is essential: how many of us could get anything
out of a book if we were constantly saying, in a small voice, "Hey,
look at me - I'm reading this thing"?
I was surprised by how easy it was to use, and surprised by how
much can be stored on it. I liked the rather elegant, retro design,
more like a digital slate than a piece of flashy gear - that's good
marketing. But the real question is whether it is so useful that it
is worth more than £400? And on top of that, there's the material
itself, because although a deal with the Amazon subsidiary
Mobipocket means there will be access to about 50,000 titles, and
though publishers such as Macmillan are now moving into ebooks for
new authors, scientific books and other material, the proud owner
of an Iliad would still buy "books" to download. It isn't cheap and
it isn't going to replace beautifully made books, or books with
lots of pictures, or the latest must-be-seen-with novel, or the
read-and-chuck airport thriller. It won't destroy bookshops, any
more than the much more advanced music-download business has
destroyed albums. I won't be thinning out my book collection and
digitalising it.
And yet ... I can now see a way in which this, or its future
rivals, could become useful to me. In our house, every day we get
mounds of newsprint, much of it thrown instantly away. The stuff
hangs around like intellectual scurf, and it's depressing. For my
broadcasting work, another great wodge of briefings, clippings and
so on arrives, most days of the week. They pile up. Just looking at
them saps the spirit. Then there are the pamphlets and instant
books, the magazines and so on. The waste of time and space, as
well as paper and transport, increasingly offends me. The energy
cost of downloading such material and looking at it on screen is a
small fraction of the energy used in printing it out on paper.
Being able to download newspapers each morning, which is likely to
be possible soon, or the RSS newsfeeds already available
everywhere, would be a major bonus. The same goes for the work
briefing. Yes, it's another threat to traditional newspapers, since
I would certainly screen out what I don't read (fashion, sport,
much of business news) ahead of time. If I can scrawl all over
those bits of "paper", making my own notes, better still.
Then there's travelling. Mostly I carry round a bulging bag of
books, and on holiday it's bigger still - a great back-straining
burden. If I could download a dozen new novels or biographies and
carry them in super-compressed form inside my reader, it would make
getting about a lot easier. I'd still take paper books with
pictures, and paper books I wanted to scribble on and keep for
ever, but even there, we are talking about a minority of works.
Overall, I am reluctantly impressed with my ebook. Yet I write
this on a busy table crammed with books - mostly for my Radio 4
programme Start the Week, as it happens. There's a brilliant new
biography of the young Stalin, John Major on the history of early
cricket (fascinating plates in both), Mark Tully's new book on
India, and Timothy Phillips's book on the Beslan massacre, which is
really a book about Russia and the Caucasus. Over there is a
picture book on war graves (very moving), and a book from the 1930s
about Walter Raleigh for a radio project. And at any minute, the
doorbell will go and the very first bound copy of my own new book,
a history of modern Britain, will arrive - I hope. And the truth is
that all of these give me pleasure of a kind I won't find on a
screen. All my life I've somehow assumed that simply owning books
like Tully's, or the Stalin biography, made me a better person.
Well, that didn't work, but the instinct remains.
Meanwhile, my advice to the makers is to refine the page-turning
just a little more, offer a battered blue cloth-bound wallet and,
above all, make it smell - just a little musty, please. Or dank.
You could offer a choice. But it's clear enough that after all the
waiting and the over-hyping, the ebook is arriving. Before long you
are going to see them being carried nonchalantly around. And after
that some of you, at least, are going to buy one.
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