HB: For how much longer will the book as we know it continue to exist?
All the publishers I've ever spoken to about this seem serenely confident that bound & glued paper wodges will survive long into the 21st century. I personally think that's likely too, but that doesn't mean that e-books won't end up gobbling a big slice of what is now the books market.
The Amazon Kindle doesn't seem to have gone great guns since its launch. I don't know anyone who's got one, or even anyone who wants one. But it's selling all the same. A US tech blog, Tech Crunch, reports:
"240,000 Kindles have been shipped since November, according to a source close to Amazon with direct knowledge of the numbers.
Doing a little back of the envelope math, that brings total sales of the device so far to between $86 million and $96 million (the price of the device was reduced to $360 from $400 last May). Then add the amounts spent on digital books, newspapers, and blogs purchased to read on the device, and you get a business that has easily brought in above $100 million so far"
You can read the full piece here. And for college students, say, what could be better than a Kindle? It can hold dozens of textbooks, it can make them searchable, it's easily refreshed. I don't like the idea much, but the e-book is a-coming.
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The e-book is coming for non-fiction, yes. It has huge advantages. But two things need to happen before it overtakes the book as the physical form of fiction:
1) A whole generation of novelists needs to have grown up and learnt to write with the hyperlink as part of their basic writerly technical toolkit for plot, character and structure. Until then the book is a much better, cheaper technology for transmitting narrative.
2) They need to invent a Kindle I can read in the bath, the rain, at odd angles and without worrying about charging it and having it pick-pocketed out of my bag.
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