Abstract
E-books have grown to have a variety of meanings. The author describes the economic and institutional context of the rise of e-books, showing how e-books shift experiences of reading.
A man and a woman stand side by side in front of a blank white backdrop. They are both young and attractive. The man is holding Amazon’s proprietary e-book reading device, the Kindle. The woman holds open an ordinary hardcover book, from which she glances up briefly.
“That a Kindle? I only read real books,” says the woman dismissively.
“I’m reading a real book,” he protests amiably.
What follows is a rapid-fire debate between the two about the relative merits of “real” paper books and e-books. At first it seems like a draw. Both, the pair conclude, can be read in bright light; both can save your place for you if you decide to put it down and pick it up later. But then the woman plays her trump card: only a real book gives one the tactile satisfaction of actually folding down a page to mark one’s place. She dramatically demonstrates this feature. After a comedic pause—and a dubious glance from her companion—she then sheepishly asks to see his Kindle.
This scenario is the first in a series of savvy television ads to promote the online superstore and bookseller Amazon’s Kindle. Rather than argue that e-books are better than printed books, the hook is simply that the Kindle won’t make you look old fashioned. (And the last thing a pretty girl wants is to look uncool in front of a handsome guy, right?)
Granted, women are the primary purchasing demographic for books, and the Kindle has proved particularly popular with romance novel aficionados and aging readers, who prefer its text-resizing function. But is it really necessary to try to shame potential customers into buying the product by casting them as technophobes?
Why didn’t the ad campaign lead, instead, with a stronger substantive argument about, say, the portability of e-books and how convenient they are to buy online? E-books even offer instant gratification, a boon for collectors and completists. Subsequent spots using the same actors do focus upon precisely these features. There is no denying that year after year growth figures of the e-book market have been impressive; sales grew 200 percent worldwide in 2010 alone, with the lion’s share of that in the United States. But of course, statistics can be deceptive, particularly since the market started from nothing. In fact, the reason why Amazon’s commercial is obliged to convince potential customers that e-books are just as good as “real books”—printed books—is that some readers are not yet convinced.
Are they right not to be convinced? Perhaps. Jokes about the infinite battery life of ordinary ink on paper are well-taken. And books are not just for reading: they are art objects and status symbols, disposable commodities and collectors’ items. E-books cannot be used to decorate a large room, prop a door open, or swat a fly. (Well, maybe you could use an e-reading device to swat a fly, but at $79 a pop for the ad-supported Kindle, would you really want to?)
The number of devices optimized for e-books (usually published as .epub files) has risen dramatically since Amazon’s Kindle (with its proprietary .azw format) first debuted in 2007. Barnes & Noble introduced the competing NOOK in 2009 and promoted it heavily in its brick-and-mortar stores. According to the data firm IDC, the Kindle represented 52 percent of the e-reader market in 2011, but the NOOK came in second with 21 percent. Then there’s Apple’s iPad, which, while it’s not specifically designed for books, is a popular platform for media consumption generally and electronic publications in particular.
These e-books, and the hardware and software apparatus required to display them, do not exist primarily for the convenience of the user. Rather, they exist for the convenience of the bookseller and copyright holders. An alphabet soup of acronyms, including DRM (digital rights management), DAM (digital asset management), and DOI (digital object identifiers), protect the value of the book from the standpoints of the author, the publisher, and the retailer, but serve only to put restrictions upon the customer. The e-book user is not allowed to copy the book, print it out, give it away, remix it, or resell it. In fact, a close reading of Amazon’s Terms of Service agreement (to which all users must formally assent) reveals that e-book buyers are only licensing their copies from the copyright holder; in the legal sense, they don’t even own the book they’ve just “bought”! By limiting readers’ range of possible uses—particularly those aimed at avoiding paying the asking price—e-books are optimized for selling.
Yet if this is true, we must wonder why the world didn’t go “e-” sooner. The ability to produce and render text digitally was one of modern computing’s earliest breakthroughs; yet the market for e-books postdates the markets for digital music and even video. Publishing houses invested heavily in books on CD-ROM in the 1990s, but they never caught on. Partially, this was because of concerns about eyestrain caused by ordinary backlit computer screens; E Ink technology has since alleviated this problem. All of the major e-reader and tablet players, including Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, have already or are soon to debut color screens, and they provide apps that are compatible with personal computers and cell phones (which typically have backlit screens).
Nonetheless, the real reason for the digital delay is quite simple: While retailers like Amazon have long been enthusiastic about them, only recently have authors and publishing companies bought into e-books. Fears of piracy facilitated by digitization aside, these groups were wary of giving Amazon the authority to make the rules in the way the music industry had with Apple and iTunes. And as ardent lovers of “real books” themselves, few authors and publishers wished to hasten the death of print. Only with the impending demise of the bookstore chain Borders—and the potential loss of one of American book publishing’s most important retail venues—was there sufficient motivation to look seriously at e-books.
E-books may have been part of the reason why Borders finally went out of business on September 18, 2011, but the connection is not a direct one. Investors punished Borders for its incoherent digital strategy and inability to compete with Amazon online, the way Barnes & Noble does. (And, to be sure, competition with Amazon was as much about selling ordinary printed books online as it was about e-books.) Borders was also overinvested in leases on real estate for its physical stores, as well as in CD and DVD sales. When the economic crisis hit, it became clear to everyone in the industry that Borders would not survive, and new ways of selling books would become imperative. At that point, the publishing industry put its lingering reservations aside and began putting its collective weight behind e-books.
New technologies do not exist in a vacuum; their ultimate success or failure is always contingent upon socio-economic forces. Rather than the natural result of technological progress, e-books show what happens when a big corporation begins to sink and people dependent on that corporation (in this case, authors and publishers) fear losing their livelihoods. This is the real story behind e-books, which are essentially just props. The protagonists are still people and their collective social arrangements and interactions.
Books aren’t just for reading: they are art objects and status symbols, disposable commodities and collectors’ items.
What does this mean for readers confronting a new biblio-scape? Though it is still too early to tell, one thing is certain: social practices that surround the use of books will change. Despite the iconic image of a lone reader engrossed in a book, books are social. We share them, we discuss and debate them, we cite them, and we gather in places like libraries and bookstores that collect them. But since these behaviors don’t bring direct profit, they aren’t always facilitated by the new technology. As the e-book becomes an everyday fixture, it threatens to limit these sorts of interactions, to the impoverishment of our communal life.
Still, there are relatively few people in the publishing industry who believe that the Kindle and its ilk have sounded the death knell of the printed book. Rather, the rise of the e-book marks the emergence of another new medium and the ongoing proliferation of media forms competing for our attention—not the replacement of an old one by a new one. Even the demise of Borders opens up space for new printed book retail outlets. The industry’s continued economic reliance upon print sales, and affection for the printed book, can be expected to wield influence upon how books are consumed. E-books place new constraints upon sociability, to be sure. But as an advertising slogan for Amazon’s Kindle proclaims: The book will live on.