Books in bytes
BAGESHREE S.
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BOOKS Electronic books haven't quite arrived in India. But the very idea throws up some interesting debates
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Stephen King created publishing history when he released Riding the Bullet as an e-book — and only as an e-book. He wasn't the first to write one, but was the first "proper" writer to do so. It sold 5,00,000 copies in 48 hours at $2.5 each. Some authors, who had tried their hand at it earlier, say that after King's phenomenal success, people suddenly stopped asking them one thing they never failed to ask earlier: "Hey, when will you write a real book?"
Those of us loyal to good old paper — as of now we far outnumber the converts to digital pages — might still be asking the good old question: is a book a book if you can't take it to bed? But go online and you learn that much more than what meets our traditional eye is happening in the virtual world and that you can actually carry an e-book to bed if you have a reading device spiffy enough! Of course, several new and complex questions have cropped up — ranging from those related to laws on copyright, royalty and piracy safeguards to socio-cultural ones on what this phenomenon does to our basic conceptions of "literacy" or even "book".
On the Net, you will come across several sites selling e-books and devices to write, publish and read them, which are being updated by the day. There is also plenty of free advice on how to write a "successful" e-book. A good number of books that are in print are also today available as e-books. Amazon.com, for instance, offers paper and electronic versions of several books — yes, even Da Vinci Code. You will also find some cyberspace Robin Hood such as Project Gutenberg which provides books that are in "public domain" (after the copyright period). This means that most classics — from Alice in Wonderland to The Bible — can be read here for free.
Are all these developments harbingers of a time when the book, as we understand it today, will no longer exist? That's a far-fetched and highly speculative theory, as much as the one which prophets of doom came up with when television and Internet arrived. We've all see how the number of publishing houses, newspapers and writers has only grown since then and the old mediums have co-existed with new ones, if not always in harmony. But new mediums have, no doubt, altered the way we look at several traditionally defined notions of knowledge and its sources. E-books could do that too in the times to come.
Observers of the new phenomenon have pointed to one very interesting offshoot of the arrival of e-books: that it shatters the traditional opposition between the image on the screen and the reading culture. But it could change what reading means. For instance, reading need no longer be a linear process, with hyperlinks in an e-format freely allowing you to move between various texts and sounds or visuals becoming possible supplements to reading. Roger Chartier, in an article on the phenomenon, says that the shift to codex format (pages assembled, folded and bound) from scrolls also meant a redefinition of the reading and writing culture.
Equally interesting is the way the new format changes our notion of "authority" the written text carries with it. An e-text can come without all institutional filters that often accompany a printed text (agents, publishers, editors, critics... ). One could see this as a highly democratic and liberating process. It, at least in theory, means that a writer can himself mass-produce a text (since it costs nothing per unit) and deliver at a reasonable price or even free without getting caught in the trappings of the literary marketplace, giving the whole business the edge of a cottage industry. It also opens up the possibility of constant interaction with one's reader and of shaping a text in conversation with him or her.
But an unmediated digital world of words does come with it's own share of problems. Many have asked if it also means a lack of accountability and proliferation of mediocre and raw writing. For instance, writer Umberto Eco, even as he recognises the potential of the new medium, warns that it could establish an "anything goes" of literary tastes. Other critics have pointed out that e-books don't necessarily ensure "free and spontaneous communication", with big economic interests forever waiting to exploit any new medium. We see that big players in the publishing market are already simultaneously buying print and e-publishing rights from authors. Some fear that the medium, which involves expensive gadgets, might also create new classes: techno-have literates and techno-have-not illiterates.
But anything said at this stage, when the e-book is yet to define itself as an independent communication mode, could at best be speculation. More so in a country where we are struggling with illiteracy at a basic level and the mention of an e-book elicits a "What?!" response from most members of the literate population.
Chartier says that the long history of reading clearly illustrates that the revolution in the order of practice is always slower than technological innovations. "New ways of reading did not follow immediately after the invention of printing. Similarly, the intellectual categories which we associate with the world of texts will endure with the new forms of book..." He says there is a big gap between technological advances and the reality of reading practices which are still attached to printed objects.
That explains why even those of us not averse to the idea of reading on the Net often hurry to take printouts of the stuff we pick to read rather than save them on our PCs in digital format itself. Says Eco: "I am not at all opposed to the fact that an e-book could perfectly well replace the book, even though, by habit, I prefer the book as far as reading mechanisms are concerned. Then there are the emotional aesthetic, tactile dimensions — you can leaf through the beautiful paper of the book, although here too, in three generations, things might well be different."
In our tongue
Writer Vasudhendra brought out his works as an e-book was to try the feasibility of the format in Kannada and reach out to readers abroad without distribution hassles.
"But people aren't comfortable reading off a screen," says Vasudhendra. An IT professional, he would himself not read a literary text on screen if it's easily available in print, though he is comfortable with technical reading on screen.
Vasudhendra believes that the e-format offers great possibilities for archival work, where there are no commercial interests.
He, along with software professional and language enthusiast Sheshadri Vasu and literary critics O.L. Nagabhushana Swamy and H.S. Raghavendra Rao, has started work on the ambitious project of archiving ancient Kannada literary texts in the digital format. He points out that there are many such efforts, including a German site that has ancient Sanskrit texts with elaborate notes. In Kannada too we have kannadasaahithya.com that has entire literary texts (especially those by U.R. Ananthamurthy) that can be read online. Thatskannada.com also offers some literary texts online.
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