Gayle Jones packs hundreds of books when she goes on vacation.
But she's not about to lug a bunch of boxes around so she puts all the books in her purse.
Jones is one of a growing contingent of avid readers who have adopted an e-reader, a light, portable device that displays electronic books — e-books. Jones bought her Kobo a few months ago and has visions of lounging with it on the deck of her cabin.
"When I go away anywhere there's no way I'm going to be hauling books from the library," said the 68-year-old St. Albert resident who consumes one or two books a week.
"The books are so big and heavy. As I'm getting older, with my arthritic hands, it's getting harder and harder to hold onto the books," she explained.
E-reading is a trend that started at zero three years ago and rose to roughly 10 per cent of the books sold in the United States in 2010, said Sean Prpick, a Saskatchewan-based producer who recently completed a radio documentary on e-books for CBC's Ideas program.
His research suggests that e-book sales in the U.S. rose 300 per cent in 2010. And some in the publishing industry predict that within five years e-books will represent at least 60 per cent of the market.
One huge advantage of an e-reader is their ability to store hundreds or even thousands of books on one portable device. They also offer fast, easy access to books through online or wireless downloading and titles that are usually less expensive than the printed version. (E-books typically cost between $10 and $15.)
The devices themselves generally range from $150 to $230.
E-readers also allow the font size to be adjusted, a selling point for many seniors, Prpick said.
There are some disadvantages. Some e-readers are difficult or impossible to read outdoors. They all have batteries that need recharging, they don't like being dropped and aren't something you'd want to leave on your beach towel while you take a dip.
The gadgets
E-readers first appeared about 15 years ago but didn't take off because they were expensive and had poor software, Prpick said.
According to a Newsweek article from late 2007, a major breakthrough was the introduction of E Ink, which makes an electronic page look similar to a printed one and has less glare than a typical LED screen used in laptop computers and like devices. The first major implementation of E Ink was the Sony Reader that launched in 2006.
But it was online bookseller Amazon that revolutionized the e-book market in 2007 by introducing its Kindle e-reader, Prpick said. Amazon's stature in the industry meant it was perfectly positioned to produce an affordable reader ($399US) and also push publishers to provide content, Prpick said.
"When they appeared to be succeeding there were a whole bunch of imitators," he said.
The most prominent players are Amazon's Kindle, the Sony Reader, Apple's iPad, the Nook by American bookseller Barnes & Noble, and Kobo, a Canadian product that's backed by Chapters Indigo.
Applications are available that allow e-books to be read on a smart phone, tablet or computer.
All e-books come with "digital rights management" code that restricts how they're used and shared, but unlike digital movies and music, they haven't been frequent targets of hackers, Prpick said.
"People who download books just don't seem to be inclined to pirate them so the book industry's paranoia about piracy so far seems to be unfounded," he said.
The real power of e-reading is being able to access a book at any time from whichever device a person feels like using at the moment, Prpick said.
He already does this with his Kindle, iPad and iPhone. E-books he buys from Amazon include a licence to download the book to all these devices, which maintain wireless contact with the Amazon server. When he puts down a book on his iPad and picks it back up on his phone, it will ask if he wants to continue on the same page where he left off with the previous device.
"I can read the same book seamlessly over three platforms," he said.
Formats
The St. Albert Public Library added e-books to its holdings last June and recently added 300 titles to the 174 it had previously. Interest from the public is increasing steadily, said public services manager Heather Dolman. The 300 new titles have been downloaded 129 times since becoming available in the first week of March.
Despite the interest in e-books, Dolman isn't seeing a decrease in demand for the library's printed holdings.
"There will always be people that want the paper book in their hand," she said. "And I think that's going to go on for quite a while yet."
One aspect of the e-reader market that may be holding back some consumers is the fact that there are many devices, formats and sellers with little or no cross-compatibility between some of them. For example, the Kindle only works with books bought from Amazon. There are several readers that use an open source format called ePub. Some readers read PDFs and some don't.
"You would hope that down the road there would be some standardization with some of this," Dolman said. "It would certainly make it easier."
Authors and publishers
It's clear that e-books are here to stay but it's not clear what that means for writers, said Don Trembath, a St. Albert author of 12 young adult novels, six of which are available as e-books.
"I don't know if it's been around long enough for people to have a real firm grip of what it is and where it's going," Trembath said.
"Books will always be in print and on shelves but if e-books are another way of broadening your audience and extending the life of a book then it can't be a bad thing," he said.
For publishers, e-books save money on printing, inventory storage and shipping, but the book-buying public expects e-books to cost less than the printed versions and authors are starting to demand a higher percentage for their cut, said Linda Cameron, president of the Book Publishers Association of Alberta.
Meanwhile producing an e-book costs almost the same as a print version because formatting to several electronic platforms is labour intensive.
"The last time I looked there were over 20 platforms out there. We're trying to guess which ones are going to be successful and stay in the marketplace so that we don't all go down the road of Beta," Cameron said, referring to the videotape technology that lost its fight for market share to VHS, similar to HD-DVD falling victim to Blu-Ray.
The rise of e-books is even raising questions whether writing needs to be more sound bite-like to cater to people's tendency to skim digital content, she said.
The future
Prpick believes bookstores and libraries of the future will maintain their inventories in "the cloud," a realm of remote data servers where digital copies are stored and made accessible.
"In the future, you're not really going to own books, you're going to own licences to books," he said.
"A really good bookstore will have a coffee shop and a performance space where an author can come and do readings. And there might be a lot of coffee table books on the bookshelves," Prpick predicts.
"At its heart it will have this [print-on-demand] printer and people who want hard copy books will walk over to the printer and ask for Stephen King, please, and then boom, it's right there."
Prpick thinks the number of e-book formats will shrink down to two or three and the number of major e-book sellers will range between two and five.
"There's going to be a lot of turmoil between now and then and you're going to hear a lot of screaming from the publishers as they try to get a grip on this," he said.
There are more questions than answers right now, Cameron said, but it's clear the industry is facing many changes.
"I'm excited by most of them. I'm a little scared of some of them," she said. "But life doesn't stand still, does it."
