The E-Book Singularity: Print and digital 20 years later

Contributed by Chandler Barton, UHCL graduate student and teaching assistant in the department of liberal arts.

The FUTURE: in that not-so-far-away time when cellphones and computers are supposed to make their way as microchips imbedded into our skulls, the question of reading and how it will look is often overlooked. However, e-books and e-readers and their relationship with print still feature prominently in discussions in the publishing and information industries. This question is not as novel as you may think – the development and evolution of e-book and e-reader technology began almost two decades ago, but their place is still being debated.

At its peak momentum starting in the late 2000’s/early 2010’s, e-books were widely predicted to lead to the imminent and irreversible extinction of print. Fast forward to 2018, and a dramatic reversal has taken place with print now outpacing e-books and even completely overtaking them in some genres according to studies and research conducted by the Pew Research Center.

The fall in e-book sales compared to print hit double digits in 2016 (16%) and 2017 (10%) according to Publisher’s Weekly – and the decline is expected to only grow in projections for 2018 and 2019.

One oddity in this whole equation is the lack of correlation between e-books and tech ownership. In the same timeframe where print is recovering, usage and ownership of computers, tablets, and e-readers grew exponentially. As a consequence, Pew Research indicates that access to e-books is diversifying, and fast: readers are no longer sticking only to e-readers, and many consumers are reading their favorite titles on their other devices, including their cellphones. Apps like Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks allow consumers to sync and read their e-books on all their devices for maximum convenience.

But despite the growth in device ownership and diversity of platforms for e-books, e-books sales and reading have plummeted in recent years. In 2016 a Pew Research survey found that 91% of respondents reported that books they read in the last 12 months were print: a far cry from last decade’s predictions which supposed we’d be in mourning for print’s recent demise.

There has to be some sort of explanation for the massive disconnect between the predictions of industry experts and the present state of things. Jan Wright, owner of Wright Information, a company that provides indexing services and technology solutions for publishers, thinks that the inconsistency in the numbers and resurgence of print is due to e-book’s lack of user-friendly features. “My main impression about why print is still hanging on and e-books are stagnating a bit is that the e-reader experience for users doesn’t satisfy several needs that readers have,” she mentions. In Jan’s line of work, building user-friendly interfaces, especially for indexes, is of paramount importance.

“Getting around in an e-book is not easy, compared to the physical object. Getting back to a map in the beginning is a multi-click or option-selecting process, not as easy as sticking a finger to mark where you are right now and flipping back. Using the table of contents is great when you can easily get to the table of contents, but if you can’t easily get there, it’s a multi-step process. And so the index, which is a main navigational tool, is also hard to get to and hard to get back to again.”

While Jan does concede that for leisurely fiction reads these navigational issues aren’t nearly as important, for works of nonfiction, even shorter ones, they can easily become a source of frustration for the end user.

Besides user-friendliness, Jan also believes that as readers we have developed a certain attachment to print. “The loss of elegant typefaces, effective use of white space and leading, the design of the page and its elements, all of that being gone detracts from the e-book. It is text without design, the feeling that a book designer gives to the printed page.”

In the academic and library sphere, the debate between e-books and print also continues to rage full score with proponents arguing for and against the merits of both sides. But like the consumer market, academic institutions and public libraries have seen odd and inconsistent trends, both in acquisitions as well as patron usage, leading many librarians to reevaluate the speculation and projections of experts.

“It does seem to me that many of us are having a shift in our thinking and are concluding that maybe e-books just aren’t going to take off, at least not the same way online journals have,” says Karen Kohn, a collections analysis librarian and published researcher at Temple University. In her view, e-books serve an important role as tools of convenience for students and faculty but are not necessarily popular for their own sake. Additionally, e-books and journals have their differences. “The big difference, I would say, is people read journals in small pieces (i.e., articles), so they are easy to print out.” In addition to echoing the concerns that Jan mentions about lack of user-friendly features in more complex texts, Karen also points out that unlike typical consumer fiction and nonfiction, certain academic works are not commonly offered in e-book format.

Taken as a whole, the e-book and print debate seems unresolved and inconclusive, both in the consumer economy as well as academic and library collections. Experts are yet uncertain if the resurgence in print is a temporary roadblock on the path to e-book dominance, or if the recent numbers are indicative of a long-term reversal in early e-book trends. One thing that most agree on, however, is that while e-books can serve as convenient alternatives to print in many cases, the technological drawbacks for longer and more complex works means that e-reader devices and apps will need to make major improvements before e-books can hope to achieve a monopoly.