CTO Articles
Published in IT World
E-Business in the Enterprise – August 10, 2004
Will a paperback ever lose its paper?
By Sean Mc Grath
We are voracious consumers of information. Our conscious minds process mind-boggling amounts of data even doing something as humdrum as listening to the news whilst driving to work. Impressive as this conspicuous consumption of data is, it is a mere flick of a light switch compared to the data we process subconsciously. Do you remember all the decisions you made in the last five minutes you spent driving your car? All those speed calculations, gear changes, course corrections? No? Incredible isn't it?
Our five senses are analog receivers of information. We humans can detect continuous shades and fantastic subtleties of light, sound, touch, taste and smell. Of those five, sight and sound are particularly interesting when translated into entertainment industry terminology -movies, music videos, TV and so on. Over the last decade, there has been a relentless march towards digitization of these sight and sound media. This movement, driven by innovation and economics, still has to contend with the fact that the final consumers of the information, you and I, are analog, not digital creatures. Thus we have a digital receiver (or receivers) that turn the digital data stream back into analog form. MP3 players, computer monitors, digital TVs, digital radios etc. These are digital decoders that we analog animals need to carry around, or stay close to, in order to feed our voracious hunger for sensory stimuli.
When thinking about digitization of media, a number of factors come into play. Obviously transmission bandwidth is an issue. Not too many years ago, the idea of storing - never mind transmitting - a full length movie in digital form - was a frightening financial prospect. Today, it is no big deal and becoming less of a big deal with every passing day. A second consideration is how complex/costly the digital-to-analog receiver needs to be. Recent years have seen PCs, MP3 players and electronic gadgets of all forms continue to drop dramatically in price.
This all sounds great and indeed it is for media based on sight and sound. However, when we look at the humble book - words on paper - the situation is less rosy. TV, video and audio require, by and large, passive receivers. That is to say, you switch on your receiver and you sit there, listening or watching or both. Reading a book is a different proposition. It requires a more active receiver. The reason is simply that people read at different speeds. If you and I sit down to watch an episode of the Simpsons, we will both finish it at the same time. If we sit down to read the script, we will finish at different times.
This trivial sounding difference has, I think, a role to play in explaining why digital receivers for books are not anything like as advanced as digital receivers for television or music. The concept of an e-Book[1] of course is well established but seems to be making very slow progress into the hearts, minds and wallets of consumers. At the moment, the most common digital receiver for books is called a printer. You feed this device digital words and it feeds you back a rather poor product in which only one side of each page has writing on it and the whole thing is not bound together in any way. A poor facsimile of what you would get in a bookstore i.e. a bound, double sided product in, say, B6 size with a nice protective cover.
Perhaps digital receivers of the e-book kind are teetering on the brink of mainstream acceptance. Perhaps electronic paper[2] will make its way from the research labs to the high street in the next while. Perhaps, we will soon be queuing up to sell off our unnecessary laser printers and boxes of Bulldog Clips.
Another possibility is that we will have to live with ink and paper "receivers" of books for the foreseeable future. If so, I for one would sure like to see the desktop printing business wake up from its slumber and start to look at paperback sized printing and integrated binding on the desktop. If the digital revolution fails to take the paper out of paperback, there is much room for improvement in how we present the paper to the final consumer.
[1] http://www.openebook.org/
[2] http://www.media.mit.edu/micromedia/elecpaper.html