Publishers should worry less about e-books and more about paper books for developing countries.
Those are the sentiments of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature, who thinks e-book tech is too hard to master.
Now here’s a better idea. Focus on simplifying the technology and on bringing down the costs of being able to read a number of books and enjoy the interactivity of E.
E, particularly on cell phones, can do this ever so much more efficiently than paper books can. Cell phone displays are only going to get larger and better through new tech such as E Ink, including roll-out displays.
By contrast, imagine the costs in money and energy in shipping paper books into the middle of jungles and deserts.
Related: Cellphones: Illiteracy-reducers, too—not just poverty-enders?
(Via Publisher’s Lunch.)
Alas, Le Clézio may be a wonderful author, but I think he may not really understand the economics of paper books versus ebooks. He calls the notion of putting an electronic display in everyone’s hands utopian, but advocates instead the wide spread distribution of paper books.
Yes it is true, that it is cheaper to distribute one paper book than one e-book, but a single book will not cut it. People need access to large numbers of books, and ideally they need access to the books they want to read when they want to read it. Spend $300 on paper books, and you might get 30 books. Spend it on an e-book reader and you get access to 30,000!
As for ebooks being hard to use? Well yeah… so are books in general. How many years does the average adult spend learning to read at their current level? Even at its current state, it doesn’t take that long for most people to learn how to use an ebook reader and to download books to it. Likewise, if a DRM free standard ever develops, an easy to use interface will undoubtedly be developed to make it as easy to get books onto a reader as it is to get tunes on an iPod!
“Putting an electronic display in everyone’s hands” IS “Utopian.” People may not have ready access to electricity or may not be able to afford it. Electronic devices require more maintenance than a simple paper book. I’m not bashing ebooks but they would be hard to get to bring to everyone in developing countries. We need to first focus on literacy and getting as many p-books as we can out there. We shouldn’t have to worry about tech-literacy at the same time. Especially if such technology might fall by the wayside in a country that has more important things to worry about than keeping their gadgets clean and operational.
Books are cheap and require little upkeep. I think it would be great to build libraries in these societies with access to computers and the internet but I don’t think giving everyone a device to read ebooks on would work out so well.