PRINT IS DEAD… and you better believe it. Well, not quite dead yet, but dying, perhaps.

I’ve suspected something like this was happening but I have never joined the dots to plot the trend since the Internet emerged. But trend there is, and it’s thanks to Jeff Gomez that it all starts to make sense now.

Gomez is no head-in-the-clouds cyberfreak or literary lightweight. He just happens to be Penguin’s senior director of online consumer sales and marketing for the group’s US operation. That makes him well versed in the publishing industry and gives his ideas — no matter how disturbing to those who love the touch and smell, and paper lice, of book paper — a certain credibility.

Gomez’ thesis is this: e-books are coming and they will change the way we read as surely as they will change the book publishing industry. Why is it, he reasonably asks, that the Internet and digitisation would change just about everything about our lives and somehow, inexplicably, leave book publishing untouched?

This new wave of e-publishing will be quite different to that first, limited iteration around the turn of the century. Then, publishers simply ploncked plain old print format text into electronic form. And to make it even more difficult for readers, there was a plethora of reading devices, all with incompatible file formats. What you would read on one manufacturer’s device was unintelligible to any other. It was the Sony betamax videotape story all over again.

This next wave will be so different, according to Gomez, that it will reform the way that books are produced and the way we read them. This is because e-books promise a far richer reading experience than paper text.

Text is linear, text is restrictive

This got me thinking. Text on paper is linear. You start at the top left corner and scan horizontally until you run out of words, then your eyes skip to the left side of the next line down. It’s a bit like using a typewriter and having to shuffle a carriage return when the little bell dings (does anybody remember that now extinct sound, gone forever from the human experience?). And it’s all the same colour and font, and in some books you have to physically flick to the pages of colour plates bound into the centre because the insertion of colour pages into the text is so expensive. And what’s that big word? No help in the book itself — you have to get up and go find yet another book to make sense of it — a book to explain a book — this is how dictionary publishers flourish.

e-text is different. It is not linear. It is hypertexted. It is interlinked. It joins the reader to a world of supplementary information that enriches the reading experience. Sure, you still scan the page in the same way, but those big words can be made hypertext so that a simple mouse click reveals a dictionary definition… or historical, biographic or geographic background, reports in the news or on commentator’s blogs, previous editions of the text or different explanations of something topical. E-text offers multiple directions through a publication. Print-on-paper has one, and it’s forwards only. Print is linear; e-text is multidirectional.

And what else could an e-book potentially do? Well, it can offer not only colour photos like print — though placed within the text at their most relevant position — it can carry diagrams, graphics and even video clips, offering a plethora of pathways through a publication. Surely, that is good. Print is linear; e-text is multimedia.

Book love – nostalia for an object with limited future potential?

Gomez makes the point that books are the carriers of ideas, and to equate books with the ideas they contain is to miss the point. Unless some bibliophile has some strange love affair with ink-on-pages encapsulated between cardboard covers, e-books can offer all that print offers and more. Sure, an illuminated manuscript from the Middle Ages is a piece of art and history as well as a package of ideas, but few of us own or get to read one of these. And as for old volumes, they are just so many yellowing pages or they go on to acquire collector’s value, something that takes them out of the purview of the average reader for whom the paperback is all they need and want.

Oh, and paperbacks… weren’t they also derided when they appeared? Didn’t the literary elite pontificate and sermonise about how they would degrade the reading experience and publishing? Weren’t books, after all, supposed to be weighty and bulky things contained between stiff cardboard covers, not those soft, flimsy floppy thin card enclosures? And the idea of carrying a book in your back pocket? Preposterous. Now, however, you can carry not just one book in your e-book reader. You can carry an entire library.

What will happen as digitisation finally catches up with book publishing, Gomez says, is that those publishing company departments dealing with warehousing and the physical distribution of books will atrophy and, finally, disappear. But those departments dealing in marketing, the sourcing of authors and editing will remain in the new world of digital publishing. Why? Because it will be necessary then, as it is now, to recruit and contract authors of merit, to edit their work and, through marketing, to let people know it exists and that they can buy it online.

Of course, this doesn’t prevent do-it-yourself digital publishing and distribution — we have that now — and some fine products can come through this do-it-yourself approach. The advantage of having a publisher is that they do all that hard work of editing, marketing and distribution and handling purchases that some authors can find so trying. All publishing companies have to do is reconfigure their operations to do this digitally as they publish more and more digital titles and as readers acquire them.

Readers and digital dilemmas

But how will we read these digital volumes we pay for and download? What do we download them into?

As I write, amazon.com is marketing its Kindle e-book reader and selling titles to read on it. These include not only books, but newspapers, magazines and blogs. But — only Amazon’s titles are readable on that device. Incompatibility has been the problem before with other technologies, and people are unhappy with Amazon’s digital rights management that limits copying.

Sony has launched a bevy of readers that increase in capability with price. There are others, too, but Sony is to adopt the ePub format. This is an open standard devised by publishers like HarperCollins, Random House and others. A Reuters report in August 2009 disclosed that Sony is to dump its proprietary anticopying software and adopt a technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied.

Again, as I write, publishers are waiting to see what manifests from the much-rumoured Apple tablet computer, a device, so far mythical, that is reputed to be a capable e-reader and, perhaps, a scaled-up version of the Apple iPod Touch.

What columnists who have tested these devices say is that they experienced no eye strain — screen technology has come a long way since its early days. That is one potential barrier to adoption overcome.

Apple revolutionised the music industry, the way music is marketed and sold and the digital rights around it, when they launched iTunes and the associated iPod range of devices. What Gomez says is that the book publishing industry is about to undergo a similar revolution as new reader devices are developed and titles in new, digital form that take full advantage of the potential of digitisation become available.

DRM — drag on creativity or fairness to all?

Digital rights management itself may get a needed shakeup when e-books take off. People today, especially the ‘digital natives’ born after the Internet appeared and who now grow up at home in a connected, online and digitised world are used to transferring and sharing files and sampling bits of music from full compositions. They will want the same of any e-book or electronic magazine and the rights surrounding its contents will require adaptation to allow this. The challenge for publishers is developing this user need into a viable business model.

Denying users the capacity to do this could continue the decline in book, newspaper and magazine reading that Gomez reports as already happening. The move to online distribution of magazines is fact, not prediction. An example is the cessation of publication, as of June 2009, of the venerable old print magazine, The Ecologist, that has informed environmentalists and the like-minded since the 1970s. It is not the only one to move from paper to binary digits.

Good business practice, we know, is to ask what the customer wants and to work out a way to deliver that to them while earning a return. So, sharing and marketing of individual chapters of books, says Gomez, will have to be part of the marketing mix for publishers, just as people now, thanks to iTunes, can buy individual tracks rather than entire albums. The book industry and the way it markets its products may start to look remarkably like iTunes.

At what price?

Amazon.com markets e-books at a significantly lower price than their paper editions sell for — US$9.99 for a title. Buyers expect as much as printing and physical distribution costs are eliminated.

But what is the right price for e-books and e-magazines? Gomez writes that some readers want them for only a few dollars as there are no reproduction costs as there is for each copy of a book in print. But this might be expecting a little too much for too little. An e-book, just like its print cousin, has to be priced to reflect production and electronic distribution costs plus a return to publisher and author. We can anticipate that viable pricing will evolve as more titles become available, as more capable electronic readers come onto the market and as a universal, common file format is adopted for e-publications. Without the latter we have a fragmented market that confuses potential readers. Such a market holds little prospect of broadscale adoption of e-books.

Towards an e-reading future

As I read Gomez’ book I came to see the potential of e-books, but I wondered what would be lost as print declined. Print won’t disappear, of course, just as the vinyl LP record hasn’t and still has a following among the hi-fi subculture.

It’s hard to imagine that some books may be available only as electronic copies at some point in the not-distant future. I’ve grown up with books, written a couple and contributed to a number, yet I find that I have little sentimental attachment to the form. It’s like Gomez says — it’s not the book that is the main thing, it’s the ideas contained in it. Electronic publishing doesn’t threaten those ideas, just the media they are produced in, but that media is not the main thing.

The idea of curling up in a warm, sunny corner on a cold winter’s day to bask in the screen glow of a Kindle instead of a good, paper book might sound, well… unorthodox. Likewise, bedtime reading. But… why not? Is the hold of the everyday and the conventional that strong that we can’t imagine something new?