E-Book Milestone

An important landmark in the e-book revolution has just been passed, with Amazon announcing that for the first time sales of digital books have outstripped US sales of hardbacks on its website.

David Teather in The Guardian says :

Amazon claims to have sold 143 digital books for its e-reader, the Kindle, for every 100 hardback books over the past three months. The pace of change is also accelerating. Amazon said that in the most recent four weeks, the rate reached 180 ebooks for every 100 hardbacks sold. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, said sales of the Kindle and ebooks had reached a "tipping point", with five authors including Steig Larsson, the writer of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, and Stephenie Meyer, who penned the Twilight series, each selling more than 500,000 digital books. Earlier this month, Hachette said that James Patterson had sold 1.1m ebooks to date.

But there's good news for lovers of the physical book, he says, apparently sales of hardbacks are up 22% this year in the US.

Elsewhere, David Carnon looks at what Amazon aren't telling us about the surge in e-book buying, and  Larry Dignan reckons it is the introduction of the i-Pad (and not the Kindle) that is driving sales.

Leon Roadtests Malaysia's First E-Reader

My favourite tech geek, Leon Wing, was the perfect person to review the first e-reader to be brought into the country. So how does the Hanlin V5, brought in by bookstore MPH, measure up?

MPH hasn’t gone wrong by bringing this one in

he says ... fairly diplomatically, I think.  A little underwhelmed, Leon?

ReKindling The Passion

... the new Kindle edges even closer to the ideal of an e-book reader. The reading experience is immersive, natural and pleasant; the book catalog, while not yet complete, is growing and delivered instantaneously; and apart from the clicky keyboard (an unnecessary appendage 99.9 percent of the time), the design feels right.

David Pogue at The New York Times rather likes the newly launched Kindle 2. It has longer battery life, a bigger memory and can hold many more books. It can even read the books aloud to you!

And it is a hell of a lot less ugly than its predecessor. (Shame though about the silly name!)

So when can we see it here?

According to The Times, an Amazon spokesman in London said :

We are looking internationally and we know that customers are looking forward to getting their hands on a Kindle but we have no announcement to make at this time.

Sod it!

The technology is getting better, but why aren't e-books taking off? Bobby Johnson on The Guardian blog reckons there just isn't enough piracy! :

The real reason that the music industry came around to the idea of downloads wasn't because they had a startling insight into the future, or even because Apple forced the issue by building a clever ecosystem around the iPod (it didn't launch the iTunes store until 2003). It was because customers were choosing to pirate instead. ... To put it less glibly, the publishing industry isn't being forced to confront a radical shift in consumer behaviour caused by technology, because that scenario just is not happening. Customers aren't forcing the issue by choosing to abandon books and read pirated text instead. And this means the problem isn't there to be confronted.

And, of course, reading in general is having a hard time.

Silverfish's Raman gives his view on e-books and readers in The Malay Mail today.

Uma Gets an E-Book Reader

"Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again, off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy...." Homer just felt out of place; trapped in circuit and screen, wrapped in anodised aluminium. The text just seemed to prattle. It felt atopic, not in its substance, but in its presentation. It felt like it was just floating above the surface. It lacked texture. It lacked opacity. It lacked the flatness of print.

The device itself felt unfamiliar in my hands; its frigid metal made my fingers numb. I had only been using it for a few days and I already missed the warmth of paper. I missed its yellowish tinge, its redolence.

If this is indeed the future of literature, then allow me to state my objections. You see, the pleasure of text goes beyond its mere consumption. The pleasure of text exists in its experience. The pleasure of text lies in its linearity. Already I miss that sense of accomplishment of having one side thicken as the other side thins. I miss being able to feel that gradual progression in my hands.

I miss the weight of it all. Ulysses should feel heavier than Jonathan Livingston Seagull. To carry Proust around in your pocket steals from its stature. For it should be as toilsome a task to lift it as it is to read it.

I miss the paper cuts.

Umapagan Ampikaipakan in the New Straits Times (and one of the most enthusiastic and clued up readers I know) succumbs to curiosity and buys himself an e-book reader, but reckons physical books will actually undergo a resurgence :

Because after swimming for so long in online data streams, we will need to seek out the the stationary words that only a page can offer. We will need to disconnect. To go offline. And the book will forever be our haven.

I think that is very true!

E-Fiction is Eli

It was a nice surprise to see that my blog buddy Eli James was grabbed for interview by Sheila Rahman today. Eli as you know is the amazing (don't blush, Eli!) young chap from Sarawak behind Novelr pioneering, as Sheila says, the interface between fiction and the digital world.

It’s really only through community that you can raise the bar of quality in a medium.

says Eli (and that strikes me as a very wise observation). And he talks about why he started the blog :

I originally wanted to explore the medium of blog storytelling. There are actually people who blog their novels first, gain reader feedback, and then publish them through Printing-On-Demand publishers like Lulu. There are others still who blog and are then approached by publishing houses to turn their blogs into books. I found this interesting. I’d done a blook before so I leveraged Novelr to be a starting platform for new authors looking for an alternative to the traditional publishing industry.

We need blooks of significant literary merit so now Novelr has a forum. I also encourage and help set up quality filters for online fiction, plus whenever I can, highlight works of merit.

And how has blogging changed his life? :

My work in Novelr has put me in contact with a lot of really amazing professionals – SharonBakar, who writes Bibliobibuli for instance*. I’m mostly gobsmacked to be even in touch with these people.

I’ve also met a number of writers and editors.

A few of the ideas and the articles in Novelr have also been referenced in a PhD thesis on blog fiction – which was really very flattering. I suppose blogging has done wonders for my analytical ability.

I’m being quoted now, so I better make sure each and every post I write is well thought-out, well argued, and clearly presented… or else!

His immediate plans? :

Sometime next year, I’m starting up a digital publishing house (for want of a better name) – where we promote, redesign and highlight online fiction. ... I’ve started prelim discussions with several other writers, editors and programmers.

You see just what you start when young people get internet access and start communicating with others across the world?

* Nope, it's me who'd humbled, Eli. I believe you are going to go very far, and if there is anyone who has a spare scholarship to a top-notch university hidden about their person, please send it Eli's way.

The Green Bookaholic

In case your book-reading conscience needs a prick.

The US publishing industry is responsible for 12.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide entering our atmosphere each year, mainly because of cutting trees to produce paper, according to the just-published report Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts: Findings from the US Book Industry (found via).

The situation in the UK is of course comparable, and booktwo.org quotes an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement in which environmental scientist and author David Reay throws some pretty scary statistics at us:

What with production and transport, the average paperback has eaten its way through 4.5kWh of energy by the time it gets to a reader. In terms of climate impact, this is equivalent to about 3kg of carbon dioxide emissions for every glossy new textbook. So, for a print run of 10,000, there is a cost of 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide not mentioned on the dust jackets. But this is a best-case scenario. The sale-or-return system virtually guarantees that the damage is much more severe. If half the books delivered to bookshops then have to be trucked back to the publisher and pulped, there’s yet another great belch of greenhouse gases to ultimately heat up the cheeks of both publisher and author…

Assume that the average print run for those 200,000 titles is just 1,000 copies. That’s 200 million books coming off the presses in a year - 600,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions and, even if we assume very low return rates, enough pulped book to fill the dining hall at Hogwart’s several times over.

In terms of its contribution to global warming, UK publishing in effect puts an extra 100,000 cars on our roads. Our esteemed seats of learning are a sizeable cog in this engine: the average undergraduate buys at least three volumes per course, while most academic offices are crammed from floor to ceiling with dusty tomes…

The industry is terrifically wasteful. booktwo.org estimates that :

... half of all books printed in the UK are never read. And they’re not redistributed either, but returned to the publishers or otherwise disposed of, usually pulped or simply placed in landfill.

The good news, the industry is becoming much greener :

The book industry’s use of recycled fiber has increased six-fold in the past few years, and many companies in the book business are developing environmental policies and setting goals to increase their use of recycled and certified paper, improve impacts on forests, reduce energy consumption, and lessen their overall carbon footprint.

Approximately 45 percent of publishers now have meaningful environmental policies in place, with concrete goals and timelines. In fact, four of the top 10 publishers-including Random House, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, and Thomas Nelson-have joined 160 smaller publishers in making significant public commitments in this arena. In addition, a solid majority of respondents (more than 220) have endorsed the Book Industry Treatise on Responsible Paper.

But, something else to chew on. Global shipping is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and most of the books we buy in this part of the world are shipped to us from the US and UK. And books are mighty bulky things.

Greener solutions?

Well those who love read their books in digital format tiny carbon-footprint have tiny carbon-footprints compared to the rest of us. (I hear Chet and Leon cheering.) Maybe some attitude shifting (including my own) has to happen?

I reckon that if we want to be truly environmentally friendly in our reading we should encourage major publishing houses in the west to explore the idea of print-on demand so that small numbers of copies of books can be printed here as we want they are ordered. (Is this just a dream? Why couldn't this work?)

Publishers can of course make greater use of recycled paper. The quality is excellent, but according to Amir who has used it, the price is much higher than for new paper.

And perhaps the industry as a whole (here and in the west) has to look at the way it deals with returns and make an effort to be less wasteful ...

Perhaps you have some more ideas of your own?