TIME OUT:Last word on the rise of electronic editions, writes MARIE MURRAY
THE BOOK as we know it is under threat. It is threatened by redundancy. The book that you select and hold, whose pages you turn, whose feel and fragrance is part of your reading experience may be no more. Many books are already being conveyed through simple, singular, electronic devices on which they may be either stored or downloaded to be read. Others are being voluntarily digitised.
And if the copyright issues which are currently being negotiated between publishers and providers favour internet and electronic transmission of literature, then books in the traditional old fashioned sense of the word could disappear from our world.
Of course, the benefits of e-books as described are many. Readers will be able to preview tracts of text of out-of-print books online, free of charge. For those in print, entire books can be read on the internet once access is purchased. Readers will, essentially, have access to all that ever was, is and will be published.
The days of lugging big bags of holiday reading will be no more – all that one could read in a lifetime will be contained in a smaller-than-paperback electronic gadget. And e-books will not fade, be scribbled upon, become dog-eared, disintegrate, get lost, pile up around us, clutter our shelves or do what books do.
Bookshops will close. There will be no more seduction into their enclaves or emergence with one’s entire income “squandered”. All that one could desire will be digitally available at all times.
Books will neither be borrowed, exchanged, nor lost. Our literary world will be neat, ordered, accessible, pristine, made visible, downloaded and deleted at a touch.
But, oh the loss of it! Oh the terrible psychological void that will enter our hearts: the physical ache to hold a book, to caress its cover, to turn each page, to savour its musty smell and the texture of its binding.
There will be no more rummaging in second-hand book stores finding forgotten editions of favourite tales. There will be no great “finds” at sales of work, no serendipitous discoveries at the bottom of a box of books.
There will be no personally signed copies of books for the collector. There will be no ribbon markers identifying a much loved passage or poem. There will be no more velvet-bound volumes savoured for their texture as well as their text. No gold embossed covers. No illustrated copies that one can touch and feel.
The books of one’s childhood will not pass from generation to generation. The bedtime story may be conducted online.
The library may become a centre where someone goes to click a mouse or tweet about literature.
Fellow book lovers will not be able to identify each other in the street, on the Luas, Dart, train or bus. Conversations evoked by observing the reading matter of travelling companions will be silenced.
Simple joys will be lost and one will no longer be able to determine the character of acquaintances by the selection of books they keep on their shelves at home. Psychological bookshelf sleuthing will end.
Life transitions will be more difficult. No new place is strange when your familiar books accompany you. That reassurance will be gone.
Books will become curiosities of the past, remnants of an era that is no more, when people read physical books, page by page and cover to cover.
If the printing press changed the world, the e-book is the next revolution in literary transmission and psychological adjustment.
E-readers already provide access to hundreds of books through one device.
But this is more than digital delivery of the written word. It is more than a new conveyance of literature: it is a transition in how we transmit information. It is also one more challenge to those of us who have a symbiotic bond and emotional attachment to the book and panic at the thought of its demise.
Clinical psychologist Marie Murray’s most recent book, Living Our Times, is published by Gill and Macmillan. Her weekly radio slot Mindtime on Drivetime is on RTÉ Radio 1 on Wednesdays