Expert analysis: End of the paperback?

Publishing is undergoing a technological revolution which looks to be every bit as profound as that which has transformed the music business. Sales of CDs are in steep decline as music lovers download mp3 files and share music online. Readers still love reading, but some of them are now using e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle, rather than the familiar paperback.

Until now the challenge for e-book reader designers has been to reproduce the traditional book experience without using real ink and real paper. Technical advances have now got us close, and there are already many converts to the e-book experience, particularly in the USA, where it is thought over 2 million Kindles have been sold, never mind the thousands of competing e-book readers such as the Nook, or Sony’s e-book reader.

Just buying an e-book reader doesn’t give you access to every book, of course, and there have been some stutters on the way as copyright challenges have caused the withdrawal of some e-book editions. And current e-book readers are poor at delivering highly illustrated books, or complex diagrams and illustrations.

But while the technological challenges are relatively straightforward there is a bigger question hanging over the industry, as publishers start to plan interactive books where readers can write their own endings, enjoy video and audio, and generally blur the edges of what was once a comfortingly inert object that sat on the bedside table or on the desk. There comes a point where an ‘enhanced interactive e-book’ meets a ‘dynamic interactive website’ and no-one can tell the difference, except that we have been used to paying for our books, and getting access to most of our websites for free. And the prospect of book buyers following music lovers into a world where they expect to get everything for free certainly makes publishers nervous.

But this same technological revolution could also allow some very sophisticated pricing that might make lots of currently inaccessible and unaffordable material available at no or minimal cost to some readers, perhaps delivered to mobile phones, while charging higher prices to other, wealthier readers and institutions. That could open up to millions of people access to literature, to advice, and to information on every conceivable topic.

Guy Bentham is Publications Manager at the Commonwealth Secretariat.

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• Commonwealth Publications