We tend to think of technology as hardware, bright shiny new gadgets. If we can imagine a use for it, then it’s a Good Thing, we conclude, and rush it to market.
But when we think of technology that way, we often lose perspective and, as investors, our shirts.
Instead, we should regard all development as a process. A matchstick is as much a technological development as a modem; a dinner fork is as much a technological development as a Web camera. But these things need no further development; in my crazier moments I can conceive of a digital match or a fork with a microchip, but would we be better off with them?
The reason I’m thinking this way is because I’m buffaloed by people who want to stuff a book into a microchip – a novel, say, a biography, or a coffee-table book full of pictures. The digital revolution is here, they say, so let’s spit the text onto a computer screen, or on a special handheld box. It’s the future, man, so don’t fight it.
This kind of talk was all the rage a year ago, when Adobe and Microsoft released software that displayed text on your computer, and RCA developed an appliance for reading books, now sold by Gemstar – a creepy thought, considering Gemstar is the same outfit that brings you TV Guide.
There’s been precious little talk about eBooks since then, however. The revolution promised in 2001 has not quite happened.
Why? Because, I suspect, we didn’t think of a book – the kind printed on paper – as a technological marvel, albeit one without microprocessors and circuit boards.
Books have been around long before Gutenberg created a press with moveable type in 1440. The Chinese and Japanese used carved wood blocks to produce Buddhist charms in the fifth century, and the Diamond Sutra, regarded as the first known printed book, was produced in China in 868. Over the centuries, countless typographers and designers have carefully nurtured and nudged the concept along.
To encourage reading, technologists and artists lovingly stroked the ascenders and descenders of the alphabet, weighing each letter for the precise point of balance at which the typeface would melt away, leaving behind only the poetry of the language. Like the best programmers today, they used the word “elegant” to describe particularly successful typefaces. With the same care that designers put into creating comfortable keyboards or monitors, typographers developed a whole theory of the length of a single line of type, so that eyes would not falter as they skimmed down the page. Book publishers and printers created paper that did not yellow or tear easily, inks that did not fade or blot and glues that made spines flexible so the bindings wouldn’t crack. They developed protective covers with whole palettes of colours that made the contents appealing. They created books that are easy to read and hold in beds, bathtubs and buses.
Some books have even become works of art themselves, collected lovingly by bibliophiles who recognized the genius – technological as well as artistic – behind an illuminated manuscript, such as the Irish Book of Kells.
The other end of the scale was just as important as a cultural evolution: In the 1920s, the Penguin publishing house in England patented the name Pocket Books, and produced a line of important works which sold for a quarter and fit in your jacket pocket. In a universe dominated by hardbound books, it was an ideal development for modern times, the equivalent of a Palm Pilot in a world of desktop PCs.
But the first sales pitches used by Adobe, Microsoft and RCA/Gemstar assumed all books would immediately go digital simply because it was possible to make them so, and that the economics made sense. But humans don’t behave according to technological possibility, or according to other people’s economics; they demand what appeals to them.
So naturally, the appeals by Adobe, Microsoft and RCA/Gemstar emerged as vulgar sales pitches. They didn’t account for readers who read for pleasure, education or simple enjoyment – as opposed to reading for information and facts – and who would recoil at the thought of trying to wade into Dickens, Tolstoy, Joyce or even Agatha Christie on their desktop or laptop machines.
Despite their efforts to make typefaces more readable – Adobe’s CoolType and Microsoft’s ClearType – the promotional material stressed the offensive assumption that eBooks were appealing for another reason: Publishers would save fabulous sums on paper, warehousing and shipping.
How practical. How utilitarian. How dull.
Then they tried to predict things that plainly will never happen: eBooks would be cheaper to buy, and authors would get more money in royalties. Dream on, guys. Publishers, who have always lived in a nickel-and-dime world, will embrace the savings as profits, and justify them as being rightfully theirs after having been denied this wealth for centuries.
eBook manufacturers even wanted us to read these eBooks while sitting uncomfortably for hours in front of computer screens, or while gripping expensive reading appliances in the bathtub until our knuckles turned white for fear of dropping them. They glossed over the fact that we couldn’t pass the books along to friends and family after we’d finished reading them because the text was wrapped up in copyright protection tighter than Sir John A. on a Saturday night.
Worse, they tried to sell their products with the wrong books. In a mad dash to supply content to justify their hardware and software, they jumped all over that enormous mountain of literature whose copyright had run out, and offered us fiction by H.P. Lovecraft, L. Frank Baum and Jack London, as well as non-fiction by Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch and Sun Tzu. And then they fleshed out their list with awful current non-fiction works whose publishers, knowing the books were tanking on the New York Times Bestseller List, needed a fast way to boost sales figures.
Interestingly, in releasing the second version of their readers, as both Adobe and Microsoft have just done, their sales pitches have changed. Microsoft sounds almost defensive when it notes that most eBook readers have failed. It then attempts to boast that its Microsoft Reader has “an installed base of more than 2.5 million readers” (subtract a few from that number for me, at least; I have installed and uninstalled several versions myself). It also tosses in a sneer at the old technology, which Microsoft’s top eBook engineer, a fellow with the startling name of Bill Hill, calls “sooty marks on shredded trees.” That’s geek humour, I guess.
More interesting is an overproduced QuickTime movie on Adobe’s site, in which actors masquerading as marketing people extol the wonders of eBook. They start by noting that it’s a $32.8-billion market (and remember, this is in U.S. funds), that every student spends $440 per year on books and that by 2005, the student market will be worth $8 billion. “Let the revolution begin,” crows the woman in the severe business suit.
Whew.
But then she hedges her enthusiasm. She scolds the Luddites of traditional publishing: “Our industry seems to have its collective head in the sand about the inevitability of digital books.” And she sounds almost defensive when she adds, in a puzzling non sequitur: “While it will take some time for consumers to curl up in front of a fireplace with their PDA to read their favourite novel, the revenue potential is enormous.”
In short, I hope this means that Adobe is admitting it knows that readers don’t give a damn about someone else’s revenue potential when selecting what they want to read.
But the key to the whole debate is toward the beginning of this odd promotional film, in which these terminally enthusiastic salespeople note that fully 90 per cent of this enormous market for eBooks will be in the kind of digital textbooks that require constant and incremental updating to keep them current. In short, legal, scientific, engineering and sociological texts. So there has, after all, been a tectonic shift in attitudes toward eBooks. Microsoft and Adobe are probably realizing that the technology is not suitable for all books, and it will split the reading experience into two different cultural activities – one for data and facts, which will be largely digital, and the other for pleasure and understanding, which will probably remain for a while as “sooty marks on shredded trees.”
In short, I hope eBook makers have learned a valuable lesson: Just because you can make a book digital doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good idea.
And leave my fork alone, okay?
