Have you heard of the Kindle? This little e-book reader launched by Amazon in November 2007 has been making a lot of noise. Of course, the main question everyone is asking is whether it will ever replace actual books. In the May/June issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, Ezra Klein wrote extensively about his experience with the Kindle. (A video is also available on CJR’s website.) Klein comes up with this interesting idea that the Kindle might actually change the way we read an exchange ideas with authors. By eliminating printing and distribution fees, books could be updated more often and in direct reaction to the readers’ feedback.
The possibilities are endless, and many are obvious. Currently, authors are hampered by the nature of the publishing process. Books are begun years before their publication date, and finished months before they will ever reach readers … With electronic text, however, the original “book” could be just the first step in an ongoing relationship between author and reader. In the most simple form, the book could be updated with new chapters and commentary …
This could profoundly alter the relationship between authors and their audiences. One of the finest bloggers around is The Atlantic’s Matthew Yglesias, who’s also the author of the new book Heads in the Sand, an examination of the politics of American foreign policy. Currently, his blog is supported by The Atlantic. But what if readers of his book were offered the opportunity to subscribe to his commentary for $5 a year? Imagine that some thirty thousand copies are sold, and half those readers decide to pay for Yglesias’s further thoughts. That’s now a yearly income of $75,000, flowing directly from readers to author, unmediated by ads or institutions.
I don’t think that e-books will ever replace paper, they could just very well evolve into something different. But people’s fears that paper might one day disappear seem unjustified to me. They’re scared to abandon paper because they’re scared to adopt a new technology, just like the church was scared when the printing press was invented (I guess the monks weren’t too happy to see their jobs being suppressed.) We now think of that attitude as being reactionary, and therefore we should be wary of our own reactions.
