The innovations of the last five years have certainly transformed the concept of a book, and it is an ongoing process. For example, companies like BookTailor used to sell book-customization software mainly to travel agents. Subscribers assembled their own, private edition tome from a library of electronic content, and the emerging idiosyncratic anthology was either printed and bound on demand or packaged as an e-book. This business model affected age-old notions such as “original” and “copies”, copyright, and book identifiers. Members of the BookCrossing.com community register their books in a central database and then give the book to someone, or simply leave it lying around to be found. The volume’s successive owners provide BookCrossing with their coordinates. This model subverts the legal concept of ownership and transforms the book from a passive, inert object into a catalyst of human interactions.
E-books are not merely an ephemeral rendition of their print predecessors – they are a new medium, an altogether different reading experience. They offer several options, including hyperlinks within the e-book to web content and reference tools; embedded instant shopping and ordering; divergent, user-interactive, decision-driven plotlines; interaction with other e-books using Bluetooth or some other wireless standard; collaborative authoring, gaming and community activities; automatically or periodically updated content; multimedia capabilities; databases of bookmarks, records of reading habits, shopping habits, interaction with other readers, and plot-related decisions; automatic and embedded audio conversion and translation capabilities; full wireless piconetworking and scatternetworking capabilities, and more.
E-books are a throwback to the days of the papyrus. The text is placed on one side of a series of connected “leaves”. Parchment, by comparison, was multi-paged, easily browseable, and printed on both sides of the leaf. It led to a revolution in publishing and, ultimately, to the print book. All these advances are now being reversed by the e-book. The e-book retains one innovation of the parchment – the hypertext. Early Jewish and Christian texts as well as Roman legal scholarship were inscribed or, later, printed, with numerous inter-textual links.
In the foreseeable future, “Book ATMs” placed in remote corners of the Earth would be able to print on demand (POD) any book selected from publishing backlists and front lists comprising millions of titles. Vanity publishers and self-publishing allow authors to overcome editorial barriers to entry and to bring out their work affordably.
