Steve Cooper

So, just in case you didn’t know about Mr Fry’s blog and new podcast — you’ve been told.

Books are dead. New books — physical paper copies — will be gone within a few decades, replaced by electronic downloads read on hand-held readers.

At my writer’s group this evening, we got to talking about the Amazon Kindle, the e-book reader that uses a very-low-power, paper-like screen to let people read books and newspapers, and have content pushed wirelessly.

I mentioned that I thought that paper books were on their way out, and some people disagreed; I’m going to explain why we won’t see bookshops on the high street in 2028.

We all know, I think, of the huge shifts in the music industry. CD sales are falling; figures from earlier this year had US CD sales dropping 20%. HMV have taken a three-year, 60% stock price plunge. Chains like MVC and Tower Records are dead. Virgin Megastores are gone from the high street.

Why?

Two things have conspired to kill the CD, and the stores that sell them. Neither of these things would have been enough on their own, but paired together, they have sealed the fate of the CD. It may look alive still, but it is fatally wounded.

The two things, then; the iPod, and broadband.

First, the iPod. Portable music used to mean a walkman. You carried round one hour of music, and left your CD library at home. The iPod changed that, though. A full-fat 160gb ipod will hold about 3,000 albums. You don’t carry one item from the library anymore; you carry the entire library. This is huge. Once you’ve experienced it, the idea of not having all your music with you feels prehistoric.

Second; broadband. So you’ve got an iPod, and now you need music on it. What options do you have;

1. Buy a CD and rip it.
2. Borrow a friend’s CD and rip it.
3. Download it from an on-line retailer line like emusic or itunes.
4. Download it from a site like mininova using peer-to-peer software like µTorrent.

Downloading is, again, simply better. Legit copies are cheaper, and the selection can be better than a shop. You don’t have to buy full albums, saving you more money. It’s fast, too. If you were standing in HMV’s doorway, and I was sitting in front of my PC, I bet you I could buy an album faster than you. And of course, using peer-to-peer software like µTorrent, one could probably download it in about ten minutes, for free.

The combination is lethal; the CD is no longer the component part of a music library; the MP3 has displaced it.

So…

books.

What would it take for this to happen to books?

Well, there would have to be a reading device that was comparable to reading a book. The kindle is one of the first devices, the sony reader is another. It won’t be long before we see a reader with a screen that compares to paper, but which will hold your entire library. And no reason why you couldn’t make readers share documents via bluetooth or wireless. We’ll have the book equivalent of iPods. Give that a couple of years.

Then we’ll need book content, delivered over the internet. Well, that won’t be hard. The beating heart of the web is just that; a text delivery system. HTML and PDFs will be the new component part of a text library. Amazon will push publishers to produce electronic equivalents of their books, which won’t be hard because they are all typeset on computers anyway. Content will drive uptake of the readers; people with readers will demand content. The internet will deliver legitimate and illegitimate content, and readers will become standard urban gear.

Borders will go the way of HMV.

You know what I think the killer app will be here? Schoolkids. Schoolkids with one reader in their bag, with all their schoolbooks downloaded, along with a copy of wikipedia P2P-copied there just in case.

Two things you should read; this coilhouse post introducing “The Decline of Fashion Photography”.

The main article traces one art form from the fifties to the present-day in twenty-eight photos and comments. Her argument is that the form has descended from a heyday to a low point nowadays, with either too little art, or too little fashion.

In a wider sense, it’s interesting to consider whether art forms generally go through such rises and falls. This has to be quite focussed; I think arguing for a golden age of cinema, or of music, would be ridiculous; but arguing for the heydey of zombie explotation movies, or mod, or house music, that’s possible.

For me, the interesting question is around sci-fi short fiction. Recently, it’s been argued and riffed on that science fiction short story mags like Analog have been declining in circulation; does this mean that form of written, printed short fiction drawing to a close? Is it being transformed by the internet? free electronic distribution of magazines like hub, reworking the form into flash fiction, and changing the medium by podcasting (eg pseudopod) suggest the forms mutating rapidly and that the classic sub-10,000 word, printed paper story might well atrophy away. After all, while people might not be comfortable reading a whole book on a screen, they’ll read an awful lot of short pieces.

PS: I’d recommend coilhouse; it’s a interesting art blog focussing on alt culture.