There's more to books than reading

As the annual Frankfurt Book Fair is about to kick off, the publishing event of the year is not the latest Dan Brown thriller, or even China (theme of this year’s fair), it is the possible launch of Amazon’s e-book reader Kindle in Britain and Europe.
Speculation over the launch date of the Kindle, till now only available in the US, is reaching a frenzy among nervous book industry people.
But who will dump books and switch to the Kindle and other e-book readers? The Sony reader is already available here, and has made no impact on reading habits.
If literary festivals are anything to go by, the main readers of novels are women over fifty, and few of them are digital natives. Not that they aren’t embracing new technology - many have joined Facebook reading groups, recommending books and discussing them online. But that hardly signals the end of the paperback.
The real impact will not be on those who choose to read, but those who have to for work or education.
The legal profession has been long interested in e-readers. Rather than wheeling in truckloads of fat ring binders and box files – as much a hallmark of the legal profession as wigs and gowns, Item#28867 can be instantly called up on their e-book readers, without shuffling through a myriad of papers (for which they charge their clients £30 per copy),
That might put out of work some court porters, and a large number of Edwardian-era trolleys, but I don’t see too many other downsides.
Commuting businessmen also like the idea of the Kindle to download documents and the daily newspaper, it slots easily and neatly into their briefcases.
But the really big users will be schools and universities. They will determine the success or not of e-readers.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California put the cat among the pigeons in June by announcing the end of the annual buying of textbooks. He was denounced as a philistine and a killer of books, but for once the terminator had called the villain’s bluff with skill rather than muscle. For years, text book publishers over-charged schools and universities. They were about to get their comeuppance, thanks to a cheaper technological alternative.
The average textbook in California cost $75-100. $75-100! Why? Because the textbook publishers can, and the state pays up to the tune of $350 million in California alone. That’s the amount that state set aside for school books last year.
Schwarzenegger’s new policy may have depressed textbook publishers but it got the people at Amazon (who market the Kindle) pretty excited, even though he said nothing about e-book readers. In fact, he said schools could take advantage of digital textbooks without computers or laptops. Teachers could simply print off material from the web.
In this country, teachers have for a long time bypassed the textbook in the pre-GCSE years posting lesson plans and worksheets online to be printed off. They created open-source text-books, if you like.
Attempts to have everyone “on the same page” of a laptop in class did not work because teachers felt they could not see what each pupil was up to. They wanted control. They got that through interactive white boards (one per classroom) and worksheets. Hence textbooks are still the mainstay of teaching and learning and computers are an adjunct.
E-readers are just another way of delivering textbooks. They don’t get dog-eared and chewed, and can be easily updated without having to buy a whole new stack. If governments decide that is a better way to buy textbooks, the shift to e-readers in schools could be achieved overnight. But teachers would still be in control of how they are used.
Universities will not be far behind. Or will they? Last year Princeton University started an e-reader pilot programme which saw 50 students received free Kindles (worth $300) from Amazon with their course texts for the semester already downloaded for no charge.
Who would complain at that? But it would appear the Kindle experiment was a flop.
Students said they could not flip through the book, annotate, highlight or bookmark in the way they were used to.
They are saying something quite fundamental. The e-book isn’t really better than a traditional book. It may save a trip to the university library, but that’s about it. They are also saying that education is about more than reading the text. It’s about annotating, highlighting then synthesizing, digesting and discussing. And for that the paper book was a better book.
But all is not lost for the e-book. In the pamphlet ‘Network Citizens’ the think tank Demos said that companies reap huge benefits from finding ways to capitalise on networks of people outside their organisations. And there lies the key. If e-books can connect learners to each other, and to teachers they could become indispensable. They would be more than books but interconnected books. And that would be a whole new ball game of highlighting, annotating and commentating, with input from others. It would be easier to do than with traditional books.
In short, it could be a better book. And what student would resist that?