Culture

The canary in the mine

August 24, 2011
Image: Andrew Mason
Image: Andrew Mason

What would an e-book festival look like? There were three Kindles held by the three people in my immediate vicinity at the Edinburgh International Book Festival last Wednesday night. Granted we were waiting for “The rise of e-books” discussion event to begin, but the sight of so many fellow audience members polishing off the last few pages of Sebastian Barry onscreen felt new, and jarring.

The information board behind the panel guests—the same board displayed at every event—promised that there would be a book signing afterwards. In fact, there wasn’t one this time, and it’s probably just as well: e-books don’t lend themselves to signings.

But book festival audiences are keen literary downloaders. A show of hands revealed well over half of those attending this event owned e-book readers, and at least a dozen said they preferred reading a book on a Kindle to reading it on paper. The discussion was well timed, then. As the festival claims in its title to be a celebration of books, and not simply of literature, to ignore such a visible evolution (or overthrowing) of the book would seem outdated, even willful.

The debates about old books versus e-books are the Japanese knotweed of literary discussion in 2011—they get into everything. On one side, book defenders cry that books are treasured artefacts, while an e-book reader is just a cold, hard tool for accessing content. Ah, the e-book lovers return, but the book itself was only ever really a way of accessing content, and the content is the important bit. The leading argument against e-books smacks of sentimentality. But is that so bad? In the end, most of us, probably, are undecided about which form of reading we prefer but so familiar with the dialogue that we’re sick of it.

In fact it turned out that this debate about the rise of the e-book was really not much of a debate at all. Literary agent Maggie McKernan and new Society of Authors president Nicola Solomon sparred with self-proclaimed “e-book supremo” Peter Burns, of Birlinn publishing, about how roles of publishers, agents and authors will change in a future writ in e-ink.

But the most interesting thing about this discussion was the fact it was happening at all. The Edinburgh Book Festival hasn’t changed much in its 28 years. If, as Maggie McKernan prophesied, the bookshop will be dead by 2020, only to be replaced by Amazon “display stores,” the book festival model will have to change, perhaps beyond recognition. For Edinburgh, what will replace bookshops and signings? Can you imagine handing AS Byatt a Kindle and a Sharpie with an expectant look? The book is the book festival’s canary in an ever more airless mine.