Bookstores & e-books
A recent New York Times piece highlighted the ongoing battle between Barnes & Noble and Amazon. The author, Julie Bosman, discussed the former’s recent monopoly on the print-edition market, thanks in large part to the fall of Borders last year. Yet despite the lack of a gargantuan competitor taking market share, and a slight boost in the last quarter of 2011 due to holiday sales, Barnes & Noble predicts its stock will depreciate for the fiscal year 2012.
Enter Amazon and the Kindle, gobbling up literature sales with 60 percent of total e-book purchases. Over four million devices were sold last holiday season, and while not even close to rivaling Apple’s iPad in the tablet market, it certainly was the success Amazon hoped for. The e-book market is steadily collecting larger followers; at this time last year Amazon proclaimed more e-books were sold than paperbacks on their website.
While Barnes & Noble attempt to break into the e-book craze themselves with the Nook, this confrontation ostensibly pits paper against screen. Over 500 years of printed literature may succumb to electronic reading as the most dominant form of accessing novels.
This could progress as a swan song for the paperback, a lament for turning crinkled pages and holding a dusty copy on a park bench in the spring. Realistically, books will remain an entity for the foreseeable future, and preferences for reading them seem just that, a preference. Panicking over an outdated yet beloved technology ceasing to exist in the face of a new device seems superfluous; sufficient demand will keep paperbacks around (see vinyl).
The larger predicament concerns the use of this new technology in the classroom. It is worth wondering how long it will take before privileged schools utilize e-readers to replace print books. Whether as a requirement for enrollment or through a loaner process, e-readers could become the TI-83 of English class. How often, when writing an essay, have you wished ctrl-f worked on your copy of “Pride and Prejudice”? What if you could look up the definition of a word simply by pressing your finger on it? Imagine reading a critique with highlighted passages in the text itself, following a reviewer’s line of argument as you read it. A teacher could point out passages on all their student’s books simultaneously, or add important commentary to guide the class through a simple upload.
The tools and resources available to such a program appear advantageous and, in some sense, the natural evolution of studying literature. The trouble with this process includes not the classes that have this advantage, but the hundreds of thousands of American schoolchildren who will not. While wealthy neighborhoods can potentially revolutionize the way we teach literature, poorer neighborhoods would be left in the dust of paperbacks. This does not in any way mean learning from a hard copy is now detrimental to education, but rather the gap between methods of teaching will further the gap between the haves and have-nots. Supplying one classroom of 30 with Amazon Kindles will run a school upwards of $3,000.
The national education proposals with this dual system would require delicate planning, accommodating the advancing and the archaic. Colleges would start to look at the applicants who had the new training methods differently than those without. Standardized test scores, already a bugaboo in many circles, would potentially produce skewed results based on access to e-book devices. It’s probable future discussions of a book starts with, “Did you read Frankenstein or Frankenstein 2.0?”
Obviously e-readers cannot proclaim themselves unequivocally “better” than a paperback. And quite possibly the potential for e-readers will remain just as a cheaper, easier way to acquire books. Bookstores and e-readers will remain two viable options for reading novels for quite some time. The potential resides in the applicability of modern technology on studying works of art which, as a medium, has not changed since the 15th century.