Answer the following questions.

1) What features does the Rocket e Book offer?

2) Could you point out any points of difference between the Rocket eBook and PowerBook?

3) What is the appeal of electronic books, according to the author?

4) What readers are willing to give up the paper book for the screen?

5) What are obstacles to eBook’s success?

DEATH OF THE BOOK OR A NOVEL WAY TO READ?

by Tim Geary

A century ago, George Gissing wrote: “I know any book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.” What, then, would he make of the Rocket eBook, one of the new electronic books now making its way onto the American market and soon to arrive in Britain?

There is no denying that the Rocket eBook feels like the future. The size of a paperback and made from a sleek, grey plastic, the “book” is a portable hand-held device that allows you to read text and pictures on a screen instead of off the page. It is light (22 oz) and easy to hold – the curved spine is supposed to feel like a paperback with its pages rolled back.

It is also easy to use: on the side of screen there are two buttons for scrolling up and down the pages. There is also a touch-sensitive screen which can be used to call up a dictionary if needed, increase the font size, even to add notes on the margin. It can store up to 4, 000 pages, roughly the equivalent of ten novels. And without use of its bright backlight, the battery lasts for 33 hours.

The idea of the eBook is attractive: imagine leaving for holiday without six novels, a guidebook and a dictionary weighing you down. All you have to carry is a lightweight eBook. The new technology also makes sense for anyone unable to get to a bookshop – to buy electronic books, you simply need access to the Internet. The electronic book can be downloaded for the same price as a book in a shop, first onto the hard drive of your computer and then into the Rocket eBook for immediate reading. It all takes a couple of minutes, and there are plans to place download terminals in bookstores and airports, enabling those away from, or without a computer to make direct purchases. Once they have been bought, the electronic titles can be stored in personal computer “libraries”.

And the appeal of electronic books will grow as the technology improves. Already a company named Everybook Inc has developed a “reader” that is based on the shape and form of a leather-bound book but with two 13-in colour screens instead of pages. But this technology does not come cheap: the “reader” costs $1, 500, and the Rocket eBook is $499, although the price will eventually come down.

So will readers be willing to give up page for the screen? John Schlein, from the New York offices of publishers Penguin-putnam, thinks so – partly because the eBook is so compact. He enjoys the fact that he can hold the eBook with one hand and read it on the subway. He is convinced that a generation of kids accustomed to computer screens will prefer the technology to the paper book. It will also be a useful tool for keeping reference manuals updated or for reading newspapers and magazines. But there remain plenty of physical and psychological obstacles to eBook’s success. For a start, few people enjoy reading from a screen: it feels too much like hard work. And so far there is only a limited selection of electronic books being published.

While there are plenty of business tomes, mystery and crime novels, there is little new fiction and non-fiction to entice the buyer (although NuvoMedia Inc. recently made publishing history by providing an electronic edition of Monica’s Story on the same day it came out in print). The problem is that publishers are reluctant to go down the eBook route because it will be difficult to control: for instance, it will be possible for British readers to purchase the electronic versions of books only published in America. Consumers may not wait for the book to come to a store near them when they can download it months earlier using a telephone line. Where does that leave the British publisher who has paid for the rights to publish and sell that American book in England?

But the greatest hurdle the eBook faces is that it has neither the romance nor the allure of a traditional book. There are no sassy colours on its cover, no roughly-hewn pages, and there’s certainly no hint of the earthly scent of good paper. Who would swap those pleasures for a portable screen? And who wants to lie in a hammock on the beach holding the hard plastic of the Rocket eBook? I like to drop my book into the sand or toss it aside. Do that to the Rocket eBook and it will break.

Also, the device starts feeling heavy after 20 minutes or so. Worse, I often lost my place, both actually and imaginatively, while scrolling down pages. Nor did I like having no sense of where I was in the book. It is hard to skip ahead in an electronic book to see where the chapter ends, or to look back to remind yourself of who a character is. Perhaps such complaints will seem like nonsense in years to come, but electronic books need to feel a lot more like the real thing for that to happen. Yet lovers of the paper-bound book should not despair. What seems most likely is that electronic books will co-exist with the traditional form. As Eric Simonoff, of the literary agency representing authors such as Tom Wolfe and Michael Crichton, points out: “There is a function the publisher serves in each market that is greater than disseminating the work and that is drawing attention to the work.”

In other words, publishers will continue to publish books that look good on shelves and tables. And people will want to display those books, not merely as items that warm any house, but as proof of the reader’s learning and intelligence. As soon as the Rocket eBook is switched off, there is no way of showing others that you have been reading Proust.

The Times