I’m looking at my bookshelf right now, comparing my largest books to my smallest books. The fattest books, (a few reference volumes, a couple of art books, several anthologies, and a copy of Infinite Jest which I am still too intimidated to begin) stand on the bottom shelf, ranging from around eight inches tall to well over a foot. The skinniest books are hiding on the middle shelf, mostly individual volumes of poetry whose spines blend together into one solid stripe of art deco rainbow. Above that is a hodge-podge of paperbacks and periodicals, some neatly lined up and some stacked teetering on top of each other, the broader volumes providing a foundation for my pocket-sized books.
Now I’m trying to imagine one universal ereader that could reasonably accommodate all of these different sized books with minimal effect on the experience of actually reading them. The mishmash at the top of my shelf presents few problems, since most ereaders are roughly the same size as a paperback already. The middle shelf starts to make things a little more complicated. The poetry volumes are slim, but their pages are loaded with white space and the words have been precisely placed. The significance of line and stanza breaks depends on the line and stanza breaks being static from one reading to the next, so problems with scrolling and reflow pose real dangers to the experience of reading poems, especially longer poems.
And what about the bottom shelf? Certainly reference materials have made the jump to digital almost effortlessly, but what about the art books? Is there any point in perusing Janson’s Art History on a hand-held device? And maybe more to the matter of epublishing: is there any point in an ereader specifically designed to accommodate Janson’s?
One of the advantages of the technology of the book is that the binding and page size could be customized to each individual product depending on the information enclosed. As a result we have come to expect a vast array of qualitatively different kinds of information from physically different objects, all of which we call books. This poses a special problem for epublishers in the student market, one of the largest markets in the publishing world. Certain kinds of textbooks lend themselves easily to digital conversion, but other textbooks, in fields where scope and color are essential elements of the information conveyed (and this includes the humanities and sciences), will resist the transition. Is an ereader worth the investment to a student if she can do her history reading on it but not her biology?
I don’t intend the above as an argument against adopting ebooks, rather as a possible explanation for why their general adoption might take longer than seems necessary. It will proceed at different speeds in different sectors of the publishing world depending on consumer expectations. On the other side of the coin we find questions about how time and technology will shift consumer expectations. Right now most ebooks are being marketed to a general (if tech-geeky) readership, so most ereaders conform to general reader expectations of books. Many even come with leather covers to make the experience of opening an ebook just a little more familiar. But there’s no reason we couldn’t start reading novels in the 8 ½” x 11″ format of the Plastic Logic reader, slated for release next year and targeted at meeting the expectations of the business community. And just as avid readers might find that a larger device meets their needs, the business community, once weaned from wood pulp, might find that something smaller than a standard sheet of printer paper satisfies their needs as well.
The final question of a universal ereader is not a matter of accommodation, not merely a matter of adapting technology to our expectations or vice versa, but one of convergence, the elasticity of our expectations compared to the limitations of the technology. And even after we’re all reading on sleek, hand-held digital devices, some sectors will cling to the old ways, with all their inherent inefficiencies, to produce what seems to them a superior specialty or novelty product.
