Vancouver Sun Editorial
Thursday, November 22, 2007
If Amazon.com's new electronic book reader, Kindle, which is the size of paperback but can store 200 books, represents the future of reading, what will future generations put on their bookshelves?
What will young backpackers trade with fellow travellers on the road? How can spontaneous conversation strike up between strangers brought together by a familiar book cover? Do we ignore the evidence that children raised in a home with books become better readers? And can you curl up with Kindle like you can with a bound volume of the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?
"There's something kind of comforting about a book -- the texture of the paper, you can dog-ear the corners -- it's like a comfort food," said Patricia Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers.
What's more, a book can prop open a door, steady a table with a wonky leg and give off heat when it burns. Can a Kindle do that?
Amazon says its new book reader, priced at $399, will do for books what Apple's iPod did for music. But the iPod is a technological toy developed to harness revenue for the recording industry, which was devastated by the phenomenon of peer-to-peer file sharing.
Book publishing, on the other hand, is doing just fine. Statistics Canada reported last year that book publishers took in revenue of more than $2 billion in 2004, up 12.5 per cent from the previous survey of the industry in 2000. Profits were $235 million, representing a profit margin of roughly 11 per cent. Two-thirds of the 330 book publishers surveyed were profitable.
Thousands of new titles entered the Canadian marketplace in 2004, Statistics Canada said. Book publishers produced 16,7760 new titles, up 6.8 per cent from 2000. They reprinted 12,387 existing titles, a 19.4-per-cent increase over the four year period.
In the United States, 40 per cent of adults said they read books for leisure during 2002, compared with 27 per cent who surfed the Internet for fun, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report in 2004.
Book sales are strong, which is why Amazon.com has grown into the world's largest Internet retailer. Electronic book sales accounted for less than one per cent of the $24.2 billion in sales for U.S. publishers last year.
Now, e-books have been around for the better part of a decade and just haven't caught on. Whether this latest generation of devices, using a new kind of display called electronic paper and rapid wireless downloading of titles from the Amazon collection of some 90,000 titles, is enough of an enhancement to engage readers remains to be seen.
There's no indication when, or if, Kindle will come to Canada, leaving Canadians with little alternative but an analogue anachronism -- curling up with a good book.
