eBook Anxiety

When ebooks really take off, ebook advocates often declare, that won't mean the end of printed books; it will simply mean printed books assuming their true destiny as “a collectible for enthusiasts”. This always struck me as a clever rhetorical move — it acknowledges many readers' sensual attachment to paper, while pigeonholing it as sentimental — but it also struck me as false. I was never sure why. Now I think I've worked it out.

There really is a trend in publishing towards what is called “the book as object”: coloured page edges, decorated and textured boards, whatever else can make a given book feel special held in the hand. Ebook anxiety really is behind it. But while this might help printed books stave off their potential replacement by electronic versions, it doesn't, I think, position them as attractive supplements to ebooks: there will not be many people buying paperbacks, even beautiful paperbacks, as a souvenir of the file already on their Kindle.

We shouldn't kid ourselves that books are born collectible; that way membership of the Folio Society lies. A book becomes collectible through being loved — because there are many more people who consider it a part of their soul than there are copies of the first edition; because nobody who owns it sells it — and through being repeatedly read, which helps destroy copies and keep the price up. The glamour is inseparable from the use.

After all, if you're not going to read your hardback first edition, if it was never more than a sort of Franklin Mint supplement to the real thing, which was a digital file, then it seems a rather awkward and useless souvenir. Why not buy the T-shirt, instead, or the mug? Why have the book as object when you could have the object as book — the object being something you can actually use?

Book-related merchandise, indeed, appears to be another publishing trend. The other day, wandering around the bookshop nearest my work, I noticed something I hadn't seen before: a whole wall, in the children's section, dedicated to plush Mr Men and Gruffalo pencil cases. There came over me the defeated feeling that I tend to get when I see the future. Here was the real solution! When the reading material has all gone online, the bookshops can survive by selling pencil cases. Or whatever the equivalent will be in a world where pencils are obsolete.

This could be an important development for writers, too. In music, when the advance of technology made paying for recordings optional, the financial interest shifted to live performance. I have long wondered what would happen to literature if it came to the same pass: much as I enjoy author readings, I've never been to one for which I'd pay Rolling Stones money. For many of them, I'm not sure I'd have paid at all. A Horizon Review keyring, on the other hand? Make me an offer.