Making way for technology

Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the “physical pleasure of turning actual pages” and how ebook will “never replace the real thing.” Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut.

First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They’re only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.

Crackly warm vinyl sounds wonderful, but you can’t listen to it on the bus, or squish it into a machine the size of a raisin. And unless your MP3s are encoded at such a low rate that it sounds as though the band’s playing woollen instruments in a water tank, and provided you’re listening to some halfway decent music in the first place, your brain quickly cancels out any concerns about ‘lossiness’ and gets on with enjoying the music.
Just as it was easy to dismiss MP3s until you’d test-driven an iPod, so the advantages of an ebook really become apparent only when you use one. Yes, there’s no ‘new book smell’, no folding the pages over, and if you drop it in the bath you’ve ruined it — but on the other hand, the whole ‘electronic ink’ malarkey actually works (so you don’t feel as if you’re squinting at words made of light), downloading new books is easy, and it can store about 1,500 titles; approximately 1,499 more than I could comfortably carry otherwise. It can also read books aloud, which is great if, like me, you’ve spent years wondering how the great works of literature might sound if recited by a depressed robot.
But the single biggest advantage to the ebook is this: no one can see what you’re reading. You can mourn the loss of book covers all you want, but once again I say to you: no one can see what you’re reading. This is a giant leap forward, one that frees you up to read whatever you want without being judged by the person sitting opposite you on the train. Okay, so right now they’ll judge you simply for using an ebook — because you will look like a showoff early-adopter techno-nob if you use one on public transport until at least some time circa 2012 — but at least they’re not sneering at you for enjoying The Rats by James Herbert.

The lack of a cover immediately alters your purchasing habits. As soon as I got the ebook, I went on a virtual shopping spree, starting with the stuff I thought I should read — Wolf Hall, that kind of thing — but quickly found myself downloading titles I’d be too embarrassed to buy in a shop or publicly read on a bus. Not pornography, but something far worse: celebrity autobiographies.

And coverlessness works both ways: pretentious folks will no longer be able to impress pretty students on the bus by nonchalantly/ demonstratively reading The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, at least until someone brings out an ebook device with a second screen on the back which displays the cover of whatever it is you’re reading for the benefit of attractive witnesses (or more likely, boldly displays the cover of The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard while you guiltily breeze through It’s Not What You Think by Chris Evans).

I like the notion of this blunt technological camouflage, where it looks as if you’re doing one thing while you’re doing the exact opposite.

Here’s another idea. Modern 3D cinema technology works by ensuring your left eye sees one image while your right sees another. But they could, presumably, issue one pair of specs comprising two left-eye lenses (for children to wear), and another with two right-eye lenses (for adults). This would make it possible for parents to take their offspring to the cinema and watch two entirely different films at the same time. So while the kiddywinks are being placated by an animated CGI doodle about rabbits entering the Winter Olympics or something, their parents will be bearing witness to some apocalyptically degrading pornography. The tricky thing would be making the soundtracks match.

Anyway: eBooks. They’re the future. The only thing I’d do to improve them is to include an emergency button that automatically sums the entire book up in a sentence if you couldn’t finish it, or if your plane starts crashing and you want to know whodunit before exploding over the sea. Ideally, it’d shriek the summary aloud, bellowing something like “THE BUTLER DID IT” for potboilers, or maybe “THE SCULPTRESS COMES TO TERMS WITH THE DEATH OF HER FATHER” for highbrow fiction. Which means you could effectively skip the reading process entirely and audibly digest the entire contents of the British Library in less than a month. That’s ink-and-paper dead, right there.