Ebooks or Print?

By Martin Willoughby

Continuning the theme of the conflict between the two, and where would fiction be without conflict, here's my take on the future of both.

First up, I don't believe that printed books will die out for a long time and maybe never.  There will always be a market for them and not just an exclusive one for rich people, collectors and luddites.  There is something pleasant about holding a physical object that you won't get with an ebook, someting that a data file cannot replace.

Whether the book remains in paperback, itself a relatively recent invention, or shrinks back to the hardback format remains to be seen.  For publishers, pushing the exclusivity of a hardback may be a good marketing tool and the paperback will be allowed to die.  Or it may be the other way round as paperbacks are cheaper to produce.  It may even be that print and ebook will sit side by side and we'll see an increase in the total sales of books.

The printed book, however, won't die out.

The future of the ebook is hard to see, but there are some technological developments that are about to change how we view it.

The first problem is the reader itself.  It's not the bulk or weight of it that matters at the moment, they wil  get less of a problem as time moves on, but the cost.  The cheapest ones are £89, and though that is below the £100 threshold where people generally consider an item easily replaceable, it's still not that cheap.  Would you take it on holiday and leave it on the lounger when you go into the pool for a swim?  Neither would I.

Thnings, however, are about to change.  A British company has developed a computer for £5 that is the size of a credit card.  While you won't be able to play Call of Duty on it, you will be able to browse the web and read ebooks.  And at £5 are you going to be that worried about losing an item that's less than the price of a paperback or a swimming costume?

No one I know is going want a screen that small, but what about the future book buyers who are already living their lives on androids and iphones?  When this technology is developed further, we may see book sized computers for £10, still not an immense amount of money. 

The other question is 'what happens to the books on your reader if it's stolen?'  Not much.  Register a new kindle on Amazon to replace the one that was stolen and you can redownload all your books without paying again.  Try doing that in Waterstones, even if you do have the receipt.

The future of ebooks and print books is hazy at the moment and no one can say for sure what the future holds.  The only thing certain is what we see now is only a precursor to the shape of things to come.