Riding the train into New York last evening to teach my NYU novel writing class, I was wishing for an e-reader, as I often do (I was already carrying my little Acer netbook so I could check email later). Then– as I even more often do, I drifted into a nap, so I don’t know if the desire for all the books in my library in my hand at every moment was just part of a pleasant dream or a real plan.
The irony of course is the hundreds of people who want to write novels, and are they reading novels? The National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass has a nice meditation on the difference between reading blogs and really reading, and Shelley Ettinger pointed me toward an article in the blog on the state of publishing, Moby Lives, about who is actually using e-books at the present time (more men than women, higher income than lower).
She also gave me the link to an article in Poets and Writers magazine about the Espresso Book Machine . This hundred thousand dollar plus machine will print a digitalized book instantly– they’ve been in development for a couple of years, and this article touches on several issues about the future of reading: the instant hard copy books but also e-books (and the fascinating fact that one of the developers of the Espresso is Jason Epstein who was also part of the development of paperback books in the early 1950′s!). I like the possibility of small independent bricks-and-mortar stores around the world that have access to all the books– I’m visualizing a little coffee shop place with only a few hard copy books, but free wifi and one of the Espresso Book Machines, and people reading and writing, and maybe even looking at shelved books. Nice, don’t you think? Or at any rate, not bad.
Universities have been picking up on the possibility of instant books much faster than the dinosaurs I mean the publishing industry, which is busy justifying their high prices as in an article in the March 1, 2010 New York Times. They don’t mention that part of the overhead for their books is not just underpaid editorial staff but also the corporate CEO’s Lear Jet. See my article reviewing The Business of Books.