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"rapid rise of the e-reader?" What, over the course of the last 11 years? Longer, if you count the Sony whatever-that-was from waaaay back when? (Yeah, I know they mean "rapid growth & public awareness of the e-reader," which is indeed recent.) Because if they're babbling about "the biggest change since Gutenberg," they really need to acknowledge that ebooks have been around for 40 years; the dedicated reading device is just another step on that path.
<em>"is a book really a book when it exists only as a digital file?"</em>
Setting aside the ridiculousness of that question--because if it's not, what did Locke sell a million of--there is a real issue that publishers and authors aren't dealing with: how do we define "book" if not by the format?
There's always been plenty of printed material that isn't "books." Pamphlets, flyers, posters, certificates, forms to fill in, schedules and price charts, greeting cards, mimeographed school assignments, newspapers, magazines... endless types of "words on paper" that nobody thought of as books, unless a great many of them were assembled in one place, in a different format from their usual.
Ebooks changes that. Is a download of this week's NYTimes a "book?" Is a single poem in ePub format a "book?" Is a list of items-on-sale with pictures & prices a "book?"
We're already dealing with individual short stories being sold as "ebooks."
Ebook libraries & navigation systems really aren't up for dealing with this; they were designed with something like paper libraries in mind. They don't have a way to show that 15 short stories are somehow "less" than 15 novels in a series; they all take up the same amount of space on the listings. The nav systems don't sort fiction from nonfiction (unless the end user has set it up), and don't address issues of "this thing I've put in the reader, it's not really an ebook." (I put my bus schedules in mine. And hotel priority membership cards. And PDF payment receipts.)
Sometime soon, especially as tablets get more popular, the line between "document" and "book" is going to get blurry enough to bother a lot of people--and someone, whether that's a software writer or device manufacturer, is going to figure out how to do something about that. (Yeah, that's vague. I'm pondering the issues, not predicting solutions.)
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