By James Carli II
For the Salisbury Post
Handheld portable electronic devices are marching toward replacing every media and device we know of.
Smart phones such as Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android are the Swiss Army knives of our everyday lives; long gone are the days when you had to tote a day planner, notepad, calculator, map, Walkman, phone book, German pocket translator, compass and camera around in a sack, and then slip into the corner store to call for a cab home from the pay phone.
Instead, you just pull a slick piece of shiny object out of a pocket and you are good to go.
But one relic has escaped the tides of progress: The book.
At least until the past year or so. One of the hottest items over Christmas was a device called an “e-reader,” a lightweight, handheld device with a screen, capable of storing and displaying thousands of books.
Essentially these devices — like the Kindle that is sold exclusively by online retail giant Amazon, or the Nook, Barnes & Noble’s e-reader — are electronic books, with a plethora of additional features such as audio playback, instant book download over a wireless network, text search and font-size adjustment.
But what do people who own e-readers love about them so much? How is the proliferation of e-readers affecting booksellers? And how are libraries adjusting to this shift in technology?
J.M. Black, a technology enthusiast and medical librarian in Silicon Valley, Calif., owns an Amazon Kindle and he loves it. An avid reader and traveler, Black took his Kindle on a trip to Europe and was grateful he could carry around all the books he wanted in one small device.
He also lauds the ability to shop and download from a plethora of titles via any Wi-Fi or 3G network. On a trip to Hawaii, Black heard of a book that sounded fascinating. He looked it up on his Kindle, and within seconds he was reading the book.
He considers the reading experience to be the same as reading a book. Unlike popular slate and tablet computers like the iPad, the screens on dedicated e-readers display the text surprisingly like paper.
“The only drawback to the Kindle is that it is not easy to just flip back, if I wanted to look for a particular character or paragraph,” Black said. “But it is a great tool, an obvious tool, because you buy a book for the content, not the ‘artifact,’ as we say in library school.”
Old school fan
Local bookstore owner Deal Safrit disagrees. Proprietor of The Literary Bookpost on South Main Street in Salisbury, Safrit laments the changing tides.
“How much more electronic crap is going into the landfill with people throwing out old equipment to replace them with new versions?” Safrit asked.
And as a bookseller, Safrit is right to be concerned. According to a report by the BBC, Barnes & Noble saw a net loss of $63 million in the third quarter of 2010, and the company blames this largely on the influx of digital products.
In an effort to ride the digital wave, Safrit and The Literary Bookpost are following the examples of larger retailers and are now offering what are known as “e-books.” Separate from the e-reader devices, e-books are books that you purchase from a bookstore’s website and download directly to any device.
The e-book system at the Literary Bookpost is run through Google eBooks, wherein you purchase a book and it is saved to your Google account. You can then open Google eBooks on most e-readers like the Nook, and on any Internet-ready device, from a PC to a smart phone, and read your book anywhere.
Through this method of book distribution, your friendly neighborhood bookstore still gets a cut, unlike direct downloads like from Amazon’s book marketplace.
Still, Safrit expressed concern over the future of bookselling.
“If there is only one dominant bookseller like Amazon, they will tell the publishers which books they are going to sell and which ones they will not, instead of the publishers giving their books to the store to be sold,” he said.
Safrit is uncertain if e-readers like the Kindle and Nook are just a fad, but he believes that to hold a paper book in your hands is to hold authenticity, an authenticity that will still work if you drop it onto a concrete floor.
Libraries test tech
Even public libraries are jumping on the e-reader bandwagon. The Rowan Public Library now has 12 Amazon Kindles it checks out, just like books. Purchased with funds from the library’s small equipment budget, the e-readers began to be issued in September, and according to librarian Betty Moore, demand has been exceptional, with 68 people on the waiting list late last week.
The Kindles are available at all library branches and may be checked out for free for two weeks at a time. There is a $2 per day late fee, and when you check one out you sign an agreement to pay a $300 replacement fee.
When asked about the security of lending out hardware, South Branch Manager Suzanne White said a lot of trust is involved, and that people are really just happy to have the technology. In a worst-case scenario however, absconding with a Kindle would be treated as theft.
The library’s devices contain about 80 titles, and if you want a specific book that is not already on the Kindle, you may request one book and the Library will purchase that title to put onto the e-reader.
E-readers are popular, yet the idea of electronic books has been around since Project Gutenberg in the 1970s. They offer a handy, lightweight, portable way to own an entire library weighing only about a pound.
It is certain they will hurt local booksellers, and even national chains like Borders, which was nearly sent into bankruptcy and was working to arrange a refinancing package from GE Capital and other lenders this past week.
But the era of electronic gizmos for any task is no longer relegated exclusively to the realm of science fiction.