Devangshu Datta: E-reading the tea leaves

As e-readers become ubiquitous, and publishers start cutting e-prices, more readers will default to e-platforms

The DSC Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF) has a partnership with The Daily Beast, a webmag ranked among the Top Ten blogs by Technorati. The Beast is impressive. It offers tons of quality writing, videos, podcasts, photoessays, etc., across subjects ranging from snowflakes to Islam. There are lots under the hood; clever conception and very good mixing and matching of Web technologies is required to offer such a slick multimedia platform.

The founder-editor, Tina Brown, was an entirely appropriate panellist in a public debate about the Internet (presented by the Beast) at the JLF. But she appeared to be the only person on that podium who thoroughly understood the medium and she is a media-person, rather than a publisher.

The subject itself, “Will the Internet save books?” is close to meaningless if it is taken literally. One answer is “No, the Internet will reduce the need to kill trees in order to deliver literary content”. The subject-line may be modified to something like “Will the Internet offer a new platform for literature and rescue the reading habit?”, which was how most panellists chose to interpret it. The answer is again, obvious. A majority, and rapidly-increasing percentage, of the world’s readers already do most of their reading on screens.

The rising popularity of e-readers like the Kindle, the Sony Reader and the newly-launched iPad, shows this trend will strengthen. The Google Android OS’ focus on being a full-featured e-reader more or less guarantees that the next generation of mobile phones will also be e-readers. Anecdotal evidence from literary forums, blogs and fansites, as well as sales figures show an increasing ratio of e-books to paper versions.

As e-readers become ubiquitous, and publishers start cutting e-prices (which are currently iniquitous), more readers will default to e-platforms. This brings the publishing industry face-to-face with several dilemmas.

Given the way music and mainstream media have struggled to adapt to changing technology, it won’t be easy for publishing. Publishing has to find its own answers to electronic piracy and avoid the music industry’s catastrophic errors. It also has to find ways to reconfigure the value chain as the revenue streams mutate. Many currently vital links in publishing’s manufacturing, distribution and retail chains will become redundant as consumers move to e-readers and e-delivery.

Those are fascinating issues and well worth several debates. Given the presence of a who’s-who of industry professionals as well as tech-savvy writers at the JLF, a panel of experts could easily have been put together to discuss them.

Unfortunately, the debate never rose beyond the level of vapidity. The panel lacked the publishers’ perspective and collectively, it appeared to be less than conversant with the technology. There was incredulity onstage that a Kindle can be read in the loo, though a wag in the audience did point out that e-readers cannot replace toilet paper in extremis.

One distinguished poet set up a straw man by waxing eloquent about the power and relevance of the written word — nobody present at the JLF denied that. But the point is that the word can be stored and accessed digitally with great speed, and convenience.

This reminds one of the situation vis-a-vis telephones early in the last century. In 1910, “oldies” regarded the phone as an expensive, restrictive alternative to correspondence, even as it started being adopted with glad cries of joy. Circa 2010, a phone call or email is cheaper than a postcard, and the technology also offers a far richer mix of multimedia communication alternatives.

The transition period is likely to be dramatically compressed in the move from paper to e-books. Circa 2015, the 2010 JLF debate will seem as quaint as 15th century monks bewailing the loss of calligraphic skills as the printing press caught on.