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Can E-Books Replace Books?

I sent this piece to Malaysiakini which published it on 25 September 00.

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CAN E-BOOKS REPLACE BOOKS?

By M.G.G. Pillai

WHEN STEPHEN KING, the thriller writer, posted his latest thriller on the Internet for readers to download and read at leisure, who would, on the honour system, send him US$1 per chapter, it did not set the world on fire. The newspapers were ecstatic, as they always are with every incremental step in technological wizardry. It was touted as yet another creative way to encourage more people to read. Few discussed it as the fad it is. As audiocasette books for the sighted. The e-book, we are told, is yet another which would change our lives forever.

The audiocasette book has an important niche in the world of reading: the blind can now enjoy the pleasure of reading by listening to the tapes. A blind friend, nearly 80 and blind for three decades, keeps his sanity with it. I meet him several times a month to chat and talk of the world, and he surprises me often with books recently published which I had not heard of. He tells me he bought, at the onset of his blindness at 48, the aids for the blind, a computerised reading machine with large letters that his five per cent sight in each eye could make out, special lenses that magnify objects and words 20 times. But these have their limitationss. The specially adapted personal computer does allow him to read uninterruptedly, but it complicated, not just to the blind, to set it up. Reading is even more difficult now since his eyesight has worsened and he can now make out only two or three letters at a time. But the audiocasette transformed his life.

He lounges in his favourite chair, slips a tape into his audiocasette recorder, connects its speakers to his ears, catches up with the world. The "books" are expensive, he has them sent over from the United States, but not for the blind, and gets concessional rates. He is also addicted to satellite television channels like the National Georgraphic Channel, pulling his chair to as close as a foot from the television, the commentary helping him understand. He is not alone. The well-known Singapore lawyer, the late Mr David Marshall, went blind in his final years, in his eighties, and a prominent Malay surgeon in his seventies, depended on audiocasette books to keep their minds active and informed.

The audiocasette book is a byproduct of a presumd larger revolution that now helps the blind. The sighted ignore it as a novelty, would rather buy the book to read at leisure. Likewise the e-book. The technology to read it is primitive, as the audiocasette book in its infancy; miniaturisation could design a contraption, one could slip into one's pocket, to read but it forces one into an unaccustomed straitjacket first.

But it should be, like the audiocassette book, an aid for the handicapped and not as a substitute for a book in your hands. Unlike my friend, a blind man, uniterested in the world around him, unused to reading, lives in his own world, a surfeit of audiocasette books of the most stirring adventures could not shock him out of his cloistered world. It is an aid useful for some, is not for all, but it cannot overcome one's inhibitions or uninterest.

The e-book is yet another instrument in the arsenal for technology's dominance. But a society, as cyberspace is, without a culture -- not in the loose way that word is used but in its impirical worldview -- cannot create one out of thin air. The corpus of philosophical writings about this world, Negroponte notwithstanding, confines itself with a flat technocratic vision of the world in which culture is irrelevant in a society which subordinates itself to this technopolic vision of the world. This is discussed not culturally but technically. The "wired society" is the aim, in which culture of that society is ill-defined, making its inhabitants virtual robots, with those who challenge it sidelined or worse. It is, to put it bluntly, a dictatorship.

Singapore has built showpiece homes whose inhabitants -- one cannot describe them as anything but that -- can control their lives with a flick of a switch: groceries automatically delivered when supplies run short, electronically have control of their houses even from thousands of miles away, but with no control over one's lives except as an automaton. It is technology run riot. In this world, no doubt, the e-book would have a place. The high technology inherent in this make-believe world would make it oldfashioned to read a book. But for it to succeed, it must replace the extant human nature that governed civilisations. It is after all the barefoot Vietnames army which annhilated the super technological United States armed forces, with its brilliant electronic wizardry and awesome killing machines.

Neil Postman argues in his book, "Technopoly", how culture has surrendered to technology. People, like kids, are attracted to new toys. Technology is this new toy. But when the toy rules one's lives, not because it is necessary, but that it is fashionable and correct for reasons that has nothing to do with its intrinsic relevance, its use is in doubt. So, Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor, hyped to a technological vision, must falter without the underlying sinews to make it work. Vietnam, is, in the West's perception, "backward", but its computer professionals now challenge India's edge in computer programming. Singapore, for all its commitment to a technological society, must depend on Indian computer professionals to see its vision through.

The e-book falls into this hype that technology must dominate, not as a necessary evolution of culture, but in a straitjacket into which millenia of human civilisation must be forcibly subject. That is challenged. Political confrontations have changed little from the past. Only the medium with which they confront has. Technology demands that the cultural resonance which govern human existence be discarded or modified to its worldview. But this arrogance is not new. Dictatorships through world history so demanded. It cannot be sustained. The Malaysian political crisis is one example. Here one side of the political fence insists upon its ideal of a technopolic world and little else, while the other uses technology to stick even firmly to its cultural roots. This does not reject technology's place in politics or in any field, as an aid not as its raison d'etre.

When Sir Vidya Naipaul -- V.S. Naipaul, the writer -- whom I first met more than 20 years ago, was in Malaysia a few years ago, I asked him how he copes with his publisher's demand for manuscripts accompanied with diskettes his computers could read. He writes in long hand so painstakingly and meticulously that his hand often bleeds when his work is finished. He said he has had a computer for several years, into which his secretary keys in his day's effort. It adds another layer between his writing and its publication. But he sweats blood as he writes the old fashioned way.

Sir Vidya writes to a strict regimen of but 500 words a day; even less, he tells me, as the years go by. Stephen King thousands. His literary books would not attract an e-book publisher as King's potboilers would. People buy his books because they want to; and King to while away endless hours in an aircraft -- even that becomes difficult with on-board entertainment. But even King's venture into e-books, I dare say, is not about to start a new trend. In the world of technopoly, potboilers are technopoly's junk food, but could the e-book be its McDonald's?

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M.G.G. PILLAI, is a Malaysian free lance journalist who tilts at political and cultural windmills, is critical of the mad rush to technological Valhalla, and is more interested in how technology is harnessed than what it is. He runs the popular "Sang Kancil" discussion forum on the Internet.