Has paper's time passed?

Paper's role as the preferred easel for literature stretches back thousands of years. Johann Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1436 gave common men and women their first access to literature, much as Henry Ford's mass-production techniques would do for the automobile almost five centuries later. I've been a voracious reader since I was a child, and spending a few hours exploring the inventory of a used bookstore is one of my favorite pastimes. But I recently confessed to a close friend, who also happens to be a school librarian, that I believe the days of the printed page are numbered.

You see, the 256-Mbyte Secure Digital card in my Pocket PC contains more than 100 e-books in Microsoft Reader and Palm Reader formats, and it still has room for music files and astronomy software. Some of the e-books, such as Thomas Paine's Common Sense, are short. Others, such as Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and the complete King James' Version of the Bible (which I'm counting as a single book), are long. They're always with me, and they open in a few seconds. I can bookmark pages, highlight words, and add annotations, and, with a single stylus tap, I can call up a dictionary to look up the definition of an unfamiliar word. Thanks to advanced font-rendering technologies, the text is crisp and clear, and the display includes a built-in light source for late-night viewing (Reference 1). Carrying a single 3.5×5.5×1-in., 8-oz PDA in my pocket sure beats juggling a stack of bulky books when I'm traveling.

My librarian friend offered several objections to my prognostication, deriving from her experiences with the kids at her school, who range from preschoolers to eighth graders. For example, she's skeptical that an e-book reader could be as durable as a real book. I'll grant her that my PDA probably wouldn't survive the drop from a desk to a hard floor, though flexible displays and other innovations will no doubt improve future devices' ruggedness. But in response to another scenario she raised, I'd argue that a water-resistant e-book has a much better chance than a paper book of enduring a long soak in a tub or a rainstorm!

My friend also objected to the high prices of handheld computers and e-books and the resultant income-defined "technology gap" between the haves and the have-nots that those prices create. This problem is quickly being solved. Peruse Techbargains (www.techbargains.com) on any given day, and you'll find plenty of Palm PDAs for less than $100 and Pocket PCs for less than $200. Dedicated e-book readers could be even cheaper. And there's no reason why a book publisher couldn't, following in the footsteps of cable-television providers who spread out the cost of set-top-box prices across many months' worth of service payments, offer a free e-book reader in exchange for a subscription with a guaranteed minimum number of future e-book purchases.

Newly published e-books are usually less expensive than the hardback editions that are often your only alternative in the first few months after a book's release. In time, e-book prices drop to the same level as their paperback equivalents, and plenty of free e-books are available for downloading from the Microsoft, Palm Digital Media, and Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.net) Web sites. There's no reason, after all, why e-books—with their near-zero publishing and distribution costs—should be priced as high as paper books.

My friend pointed out that for young kids who can't read, the primarily visual stimuli aren't the words but the accompanying pictures, and kids also relish the tactile feedback of turning the pages. E-books may not give kids pages to turn, but electronic-paper innovations from companies such as E Ink (www.eink.com) and Gyricon Media (www.gyriconmedia.com) are drawing ever closer to the look and feel (but alas not the musty smell) of the printed page. However, although kids enjoy bright, colorful pictures, they would probably also enjoy audio-enhanced, full-motion video clips and embedded Web-site links—features that today's wireless-networking-inclusive computing platforms easily deliver.

The bottom line is that my friend's opinions are a reflection of her experiences and her expertise. When she grew up, there were no PCs, and her continued employment depends on the existence of physical libraries. With sufficiently robust digital-rights management in place, libraries might even disappear, replaced by ftp or Web servers. Check out a book, and a week later your access rights to it evaporate until you renew it. This e-book-centric future holds great promise for the fortunes of consumer-electronics manufacturers and their hardware and software suppliers. I wonder, though, whether, just as I think my friend's opinion reflects her unfamiliarity with computers, my opinion reflects my atypical overenthusiastic embrace of technology. What form do you think your literature will take in a decade or two? I look forward to your feedback.

Contact me at bdipert@edn.com.