books gone digital

The New Republic's David A. Bell offers up this piece (registration required, I believe) on the possible effects of e-books on academic publishing. Although the main focus is on scholarship, the implications are fairly widespread. Bell makes two critical points: one is that electronic publishing is steadily becoming a reality for a number of academics, as university presses begin to shift to more commercial models; the second is that digital books haven't caught on in the way that digital music has because bound books are, well, comfortable. Bell points to Sony's LIBRIé as a significant improvement over reading devices that have come before.

Bell is relatively certain that the transition over to what he calls the "bookless library" is inevitable, and offers some speculation as to how the publishing industry might react to it. And it's here that I find myself at a loss for how to reply, because I'm something of an anachronism: while I have purchased a number of songs through iTunes, I'm in no hurry to rip my record collection to my hard drive and sell off the CDs. Similarly, I can't see myself doing something similar to the books I own five or ten years down the line.

Some of this comes from the fact that I'm a fan of good presentation. Show me a well-designed book jacket (or album cover) and you'll at least get me to turn my head. The digital treatment works for something like the iTunes store, where clips of different songs can be sampled. I don't honestly know if a similar model would work for books ("click here to read the first fifty words of chapter 14"?). On the creator side, however, it does imply that works could stay in "print" indefinitely -- an issue encompassed by the debate over printing on demand as well. Will the potential rise of e-books make printing on demand a moot technique? It's that gray area where futurists and observers of the publishing industry cross paths...