Will eBooks kill off tradional books?

An interesting article looking at eBook from the Daily Telegraph:    Judging a book by its cover' only literally became an option with the advent of the cheap paperback. Thanks to the combination of full-colour printing straight onto the outside of the book, and a never-before-seen glut of easily affordable titles, there was competition for the bookshelf browser’s attention like never before. That is as true now as it ever was. Walk into any large bookshop, and you are deluged with titles, stacked alphabetically on walls or piled onto large tables in the middle, often adorned with '3 for 2' promotional stickers or 'great summer reads’. Buying a book is still one of the great shopping experiences. Yet while it feels a timeless trend that our homes should be stacked with row upon row of colourful paperbacks, this was largely an innovation of the 20th century, and especially the latter half.


It is a fool’s game predicting cultural sea-changes, but I think it’s reasonable to say that, particularly in Britain and the United States, the printed book’s decline has already began and has been greatly accelerated by the arrival of the e-reader. As usual, this is a result of economics. E-readers are going to get cheaper, and easier to read, from here on in. Books, by contrast, will continue to look bigger, more expensive and antiquated in contrast.

That may sound cold-hearted but it is also a cause for optimism. As more and more of our reading moves onto hand-held screens, then publishers and booksellers will have to find increasingly imaginative ways of tempting us to buy, or rather, download them. They will have to compete on price, quality and design even more fiercely.

Also, to state the obvious: screens do not mean the end of images. Magazine readers have recently begun to notice that the quality of photography and illustration available on the iPad is actually much higher than in many printed magazines. The iPad’s glossy display renders photographs and other images in sumptuous high-resolution and its pictures are far cheaper to publish than a coffee-table book of photography. A decline in traditional book sales could, in fact, usher in a wonderful new era of digital imagery in books and magazines.

And thankfully, the traditional book will not disappear entirely. The novel, regardless of the format in which it is published, remains in robust health. It is equally true that as long as there have been novels, there have been luxurious special editions, to be given as gifts and cherished for their value as artefacts and objects of beauty in themselves. This will not vanish either.

Indeed the traditional book might well survive primarily as a luxury product, but there is no reason to suspect that it will be designed any less pleasingly as a result. For many readers, the beauty of books will always be bound up with their aesthetic as much as their literary qualities. The Kindle may read like a book but it will never feel like one.