If there were a device that could make Toni Morrison, the 77-year-old Nobel laureate, feel 30 again, would you buy one? What if James Patterson promised that it would blow your mind? If the manufacturers claimed it could transform thousands of years of literary culture and change the way we live our lives, would that make it worth £400? Would it matter that you could never take it in the bath?
The arguments for and against electronic books are perverse ones. Some authors say they are in love with the gadget that freed them from landslides of tattered review copies. Others miss that smell of Cotswolds second-hand bookshops in the rain. Fans love that they can carry dozens of books on holiday on one. Phobics are afraid of dropping them in the sea. For critics, it's all about smell and touch and reading in bed; the way we read books is an intimate part of our personalities, it turns out. Nobody seems to feel neutrally about the e-book.
The debate is about to get even more personal. Sony's eReader went on sale at Waterstone's yesterday. Amazon's Kindle is America's New Big Thing. The Iliad is available from Borders or www.iliadreader.co.uk. Its maker boasts that it can hold 41,000 books, or 100 tonnes of documents, and with a USB port you can carry an extra 32,000 books on your key ring in case you get bored with those.
As the market leaders in electronic book sales, Amazon has anticipated potential opposition to its new gadget and is countering with some heavyweight support. On its website are video clips of well-known authors claiming joyously that the Kindle has changed their lives.
"I [increase] the font size so I don't have to wear glasses when I read," says Toni Morrison. "This morning... I realised I was as comfortable as I was when I was 30 without my glasses... When you are interacting with a book you own it... read it whenever and wherever and however much you like. So I think it's huge."
The ownership of books is a big deal, of course. Books do furnish a room, as Anthony Powell knew. There is nothing like finding your A-level notes – or your parents' – in an ancient Penguin paperback. Your new temporary crush can't scrawl his book recommendations on the title page of the novel you are reading if that novel is trapped inside 260g of plastic. And imagine walking into a new acquaintance's house to find no books. It wouldn't seem right to examine the contents of a friend's Kindle while he was out of the room making coffee.
Once you get over the lack of book smell/ handwritten notes, e-book readers are curious devices. The eReader is the nicest object: faux leather-bound with a heavy click as it closes and an iPod-lookalike screen. That could explain why people keep picking it up and prodding its pages, expecting things to happen. They don't. The menu and page-turn buttons are on the right edge, which is unfortunate for left-handed readers.
The eReader comes pre-loaded with an eclectic selection of 14 books and extracts: Patrick Bishop's 3 Para, Agatha Christie, a historical romance called The Wicked Earl... The menu is easy to navigate, but problems started when I tried to download something to test its legendary battery life. (6,800 page turns, according to Sony – or, in the new unit of measurement, five readings of War and Peace.) The eReader comes with a CD containing 100 classic titles; but I couldn't make it work. Was it just me? There not being a 13-year-old boy available, I called IT. They didn't understand it. I tried Sony's technical support helpline. "To be honest, it's the same for us," said a friendly man. "It's new..." In the time I spent listening to their funky hold music, I could have read War and Peace five times – in a real book. I could have learned to read, for heaven's sake.
It wasn't much clearer at the Gutenberg Project website, where eager readers can download 100,000 books – 25,000 of them free. That is, if they can understand the instructions. The site advises: "Palm OS up to release 4... does not support .txt files stored on internal memory. You will have to convert to .pdb or .prc in order to store Project Gutenberg texts on these machines." Somebody must understand this, because more than three million books are downloaded from the site each month.
Things went slightly better with the Iliad – but only thanks to a nice man at iliadreader.co.uk and something called Mobipocket. He's updating his instruction leaflet for people like me, he reassures me. By the end of our conversation I had Pride and Prejudice in e-form and had equipped the Iliad to update itself nightly with the news from the BBC. Just don't ask me how I did it. You can also write on it. The Iliad is about more than just books, I'm told: this is an e-document reader for professionals.
The launch of the Sony eReader
Critics claim that the Iliad looks like an Etch a Sketch. The Amazon Kindle, rather, resembles a ZX Spectrum. Amazon has yet to announce plans to launch it in the UK, but early signs from America don't look good for paper book lovers. Estimates vary: some say that sales of e-books for the Kindle have doubled in a year, from six to 12 per cent of Amazon's total sales. Because of the way that US wireless networks operate, users really can download a book (one of 140,000 currently available, at about $9.99 each) from the beach or the cafe, in less than a minute. You don't get to smell the book first, of course, but things move on.
Because of "revolutionary new e-ink", e-book readers don't strain the eyes like screens do. They can be read in the sun (but not in the dark). Much like... well, books. Because of e-ink, however, the screen "blinks" with each page turn. Some people like this effect. Others want to throw the things across the room, but that isn't clever when they cost £199 (the Sony eReader) or £399 (the Iliad).
Nevertheless, the gadgets are impressive. Until you see an Apple iPod Touch. Then you realise something is still missing from the e-book market. Sooner or later, someone will launch a reader that is cute, tactile and intuitive, and which costs less than the price of 400 paper-backs. Until then, lovers of the smell of book shops can rest easy.
A History of Reading
Stone Tablets
900 BC - 650BC
The Olmec people, who lived in south central Mexico between 1400 and 400 BC, may have been the first to develop a writing system. They used stone tablets, about the size of sheets of A4, each one containing 64 characters. ]
The history of reading
Papyrus Scrolls
800 BC - 800 AD
Though famous as the source of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, papyrus was used in Greece and Rome, until it was replaced by parchment and vellum (animal skins) in some countries and Arabian paper in others. Thanks to Egypt's dry climate, some ancient papyri still exist.
Illuminated texts
From AD 400
Most of the illuminated manuscripts that still survive were produced in the Middle Ages, initially on vellum and later on paper. Thanks to a literate groups of Christians many early Greek and Roman works still survive.
The Printing Press
c. 1439
The first mechanical device for transferring ink to paper or cloth was developed in Germany by the goldsmith Johann Gutenberg. It was brought to England by William Caxton, who set up a press at Westminster in 1476.
Cheap Paperbacks
1935
When Allen Lane founded Penguin in 1935, his idea was to sell cheap quality paperbacks for the same price as a pack of cigarettes, in train stations and corner shops. By March 1936, a million paperbacks had been sold.
The e-book Reader
2008
It has been possible for some time to find electronic books that are compatible with hand-held devices, but the involvement of companies such as Sony, Amazon and Waterstone's is likely to transform the market. Sony says its new eReader will "revolutionise reading". Just not in the bath, or during take-off and landing.
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