The Print War

Print is dead. This is a fact. What remains now is the mad squabble over the remnants of this once proud medium. Google books, Amazon, Apple, Android even Barnes and Noble, the American bookstore chain, are currently involved in what can only be termed as a full out war. Even our own Kalahari.com has joined the fray with their new gobii 7”eReader device. The aim? Conquering the ebook market. The sphere of the eReader and the tablet is being inundated with deals.

In the United States, digital reading device figures went up from 3 million in 2009 to 12.6m in 2010. In South Africa, Kalahari.com has seen a 100% year on year growth for the last seven months in eBook sales. Books have become an anachronism. Amazon pioneered the idea of an electronic device that enables the user to read the classics, New York Times Bestsellers, newspapers and magazines all on one device. They have even taken on the Apple iPad by launching the new Kindle Fire tablet .

Today the Kindle Fire is the only tablet that can really take on the iPad. Publishers have fought back, overturning Amazon’s proposal to enforce a uniform price for all eBooks. Which in turn has forced Amazon to concentrate on cheaper titles. At last count, out of the 950, 000 titles that the Kindle store carries, 800,000 of them were priced at $9.99 or less. Google Books carries 2 million free titles, only because the copyright period has elapsed. Newspapers and magazines have devised subscription fees and online ads to protect their revenue. It all boils down to the fact that we will never really get a better deal for books or any other publication on our eReaders. The written word is not devaluing but rather just changing. Changing in such a conventional way that eBook borrowing schemes have started evolving.

Amazon recently introduced their new membership scheme, Amazon Prime, for only $79.99 a year. The Prime package allows access to Kindle’s Owner’s Lending Library, which includes up to 5000 e-books, more than 100 of these current and former New York Times Bestsellers. The only catch is that in order to borrow, you have to lend, and when borrowing you are only allowed one eBook at a time and only for 14 days. A week later Barnes and Noble brought out their new ‘nook color’, set up with its very own ‘LendMe’ function. There are already lending libraries such as www.booklending.com which makes it possible to borrow books outside the US, however there are still some restrictions on this...for now. We are now creating virtual libraries. Books have not lost their value they have merely moved to a new medium.

Do not misunderstand me. I will forever be in reverent awe of libraries such as Oxford University’s Bodleian. However the Bodleian serves as a perfect example of why we should be considering eBooks. The Bodleian library’s rich history is riddled with increasingly innovative and expensive ways of housing their spectacular, ever growing collection. New buildings had to be built, spectacular buildings such as the Radcliffe Camera a majestic feat of medieval architecture, and yet they weren’t enough. Eventually the library started looking underground for storage solutions. We simply do not have the space for housing the books that make up our cultures and histories.

The eBook was merely the next step into our future. The New York Public Library has even started collecting eBook titles. Granted, they have a long way to go, with their 76, 292 eBook titles only representing little more than 0.1% of their entire catalogue. They even propose to lend out the actual Kindle device in the future. It is not because we do not value the book, it is precisely because we value the book that we are bringing it with us into the future. For now, I am more interested in who will win the eReader wars. Thoughts?