The Ipod Will Never Catch on (or why e-books are inevitable)

Sadly, I’m old enough to remember the advent of the CD. Suddenly, music stores were awash with these novel, not-quite-pocket-size boxes. Too narrow for a cassette; too small for vinyl. The wonder at living in an age when something so small could hold an hour’s worth of music! And that futuristic shine of the disc!

I was too young, however (honestly) to have any real emotional attachment to vinyl, and my first proper collection of music was on compact disc.

Yet those who grew up with vinyl found ways to shrug off the benefits of the CD (smaller, lighter, more robust, more memory, better sound quality…) insisting that the CD could never replace the feel, the smell, and the tactile interaction vinyl offers, and even that vinyl’s imperfections were part of its charm.

It didn’t take long for that view to be seen as a quaint relic of simpler times…

The very same situation is upon us again with the arrival of the e-book. Ask most people now what they think of ebooks, and they’ll tell you there’s something too cold and clinical, too plain functional about divorcing literature from books, and reducing it to pixels on a screen.

The essence of a book, they say, is in the physical object as well as the meaning of the words. It’s in the look, the smell, the feel. Sound familiar?

OK, let’s be fair. The analogy falls down when you consider that unlike e-books, both Vinyl and CDs are physical objects. They both (unlike books) require a separate device to play them; they both (unlike e-books) take up space; and they both (despite the now ludicrous-sounding claim that CDs were ‘unbreakable’) get scratched.

The better analogy is with what happened when music went digital. That is after all, exactly what e-books do to literature. Here I can identify (a bit) with those who were reluctant to squeeze their music collection into a tiny plastic box, making their poor old CDs redundant.

Just like the previous step-changes in technological medium though, it became accepted pretty quickly that convenience wins out. CD sales are a fraction of what they used to be, while every five minutes almost 700,000 songs are downloaded illegally. A few are downloaded legally too!

Now that’s not to say that you don’t lose anything when the medium undergoes one of these revolutions. Apart from the ‘look and feel’ of the medium you’re used to, sometimes there really are practical sacrifices to be made.

For example, when we all traded in our VCRs for DVD players, was it just me who missed the ability to record programmes just by shoving in a (ridiculously large) tape and pressing record? It wasn’t until Sky+ (again, the digital medium) that recording became easy again.

Nonetheless, these changes are inevitable. It’s happened to video, it’s happened to audio, and now, simplest of all, it’s happening to writing. Books will have their place, but at best they will be the equivalent of your desktop while the e-book reader is your laptop.

The first round of genuinely practical, pleasant-to-use e-book readers have already arrived. They will soon be as common a sight as mp3 players, or even more so (as far more people read than listen to music). This time round, I - for one -  am just going to go with it!

Find out more about electronic book readers.