Mutants and hybrids

SPEAKING VOLUMES

As Amazon launches its Kindle e-reader today, I have one question in my mind: why am I loyal to the paper book?

Amazon's Kindle, like its precursor, Sony's e-reader, is intended to make the paper book obsolete, several decades down the line. Proponents say that just as music went comprehensively digital some years ago "" with CDs, DVDs and even vinyl records co-existing uneasily alongside downloadable music "" so will this be the future of the book.

Over the last decade, the e-book versus paper book debate has heated up, with paper book evangelists declaring that Gutenberg's child is resiliently durable, and with e-book enthusiasts proclaiming that print is doomed.

I love paper books for the reasons everyone cites: they're portable, don't need an external battery source, don't add to our growing collection of "indispensable" gizmos, are cheap and well, they've been around for years. I hate paper books because most of them aren't durable and will fall apart faster in a tropical climate or in any household with kids/ pets, because they take up far too much space, and because, well, they've been around for years.

Unless it's an unusually quirky book design, you know what you're getting from the average book "" it's the imagination of the writer that provides the frisson, the element of surprise, not the format or the container for the stories.

My problem with both the Kindle and the Sony e-readers isn't the price "" a steep $400 for the Kindle, with the Sony e-reader priced at $100; it's that despite all the extra features, they are designed to "feel" just like books. The Kindle's USP is that it allows you to connect to the web in such a way that you can pull down notes, annotations, author interviews, alternative versions, counter-arguments "" effectively create your own personalised version of a book.

This is fun, and useful; many publishers currently try to replicate this by adding features to paper books, but it seems clunky in print and works much better on e-paper. The Sony e-reader is older, but has interesting features planned, from the simple "search inside the book" function to more complex stuff.

But while the add-ons make e-books look impressively techie for those of my generation "" the 30-plus crowd "" they do nothing for the generation that has grown up with Gameboys and Playstations, who use IMs more than email. These readers, contrary to popular opinion, do read "" but not off-screen. The gamers occupy worlds that are often like "virtual books", where all "readers" are given the same virtual world, but where they can "write" their own story by changing their characters' actions.

The problem for manufacturers of e-readers is that they have a split market. One set of readers needs to be wooed with safe, reassuring devices that resemble the paper book. That includes most of us over 30. The other set don't always show up as readers "" the old technology behind the paper book doesn't work for them.

Think of the silent changes and shifts that the Internet itself went through. It was, in its earliest form, a language-driven medium, heavily dependent on the word. Most "spaces" on the web "" sites, blogs, newsfeeds "" were initially given over to the printed word. It took sites like Flickr, which allows users to store photographs, YouTube, which allows users to share videos, and Second Life, one of the most popular "virtual worlds" to change our notion of how the web works. For the last decade, the internet has been a written medium, with pages mimicking either newspapers or paper books. This, I think, will change sharply "" and that could change both the published book and its natural environment.

Imagine, for instance, that instead of clicking on a printed page that led you to the Library of Congress, you could walk into a virtual simulacrum of the Library instead. Imagine an Amazon or any other bookshop set up to resemble a fantasy environment from any popular online game. If the web starts moving in the virtual world direction, books may have to follow suit. The printed and written book would still exist, but it might have to co-exist with mutated forms of the book.

In a recent experiment, Andrew Losowsky created a fairly low-tech "book" with Doorbells of Florence. You reach a page with photos of different doorbells; clicking on any one leads you to a different short story about the inhabitants. It made for a different reading experience. Now try to imagine books written in collaboration, or poetry fused with graphic novels, or a virtual book where the chapters change every time you read it. These are hybrids impossible to capture or recreate in a real-world paper book environment. If the paper book does die, it won't be the e-book that kills it "" it'll be a variety of mutants coming up from the virtual universe.

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