Opinion

Computer Books

By JULIET HINDELL

I wonder if you have had to drag yourself away from a computer screen to read this. These days it is sometimes hard to stop staring at a screen to read what seems like an old-fashioned medium — the newspaper.

Stephen King, the world famous horror writer, has just produced a novella, "Riding the Bullet," which one can read only by downloading it to a computer. More than 400,000 people signed up for a cybercopy on the first day of issue. Even famous authors can only dream of such fast sales; most hope to sell about 30,000 copies on a first print run.

In addition to the cyberbook phenomenon, I have reported recently on the huge popularity of PlayStation 2, Sony's new computer game console. It has fabulous new graphics and the capability to play DVDs. And in the future you could be using it to download paperless books from the Internet because it will become a gateway to broadband entertainment. Suddenly, paper is looking increasingly redundant.

The computer age has long since arrived. But until recently experts thought that books and newspapers were not threatened by paperless media because readers liked the physical presence of a book or a newspaper. Books, the experts said, are portable and you can flick back and forth through the pages, retracing your steps or skipping boring sections in a way that is easier than on a screen.

People eulogize their books as if they were intimate friends — the smell of freshly printed paper, the delightful familiarity of a well-thumbed copy. I am even old enough to remember some books where the pages were not cut, so that the reader had the delicious experience of slicing open the crisp new pages as she read them.

Readers, it seems, have a very sentimental relationship with their reading material. Computers were thought not to have the same appeal and once were not as portable.

Apparently those are now old-fashioned ideas. You can, for example, download the Stephen King book to your handheld personal organizer — that is if you have the right brand. There is no reason why you shouldn't slip it in your pocket and read it on the train.

Newspapers still seem to have some appeal, even if, like British papers, they leave readers' hands black with ink. But I think, for Japanese commuters at least, a handheld computer would be far easier to read on the daily commute to work. There would be no more struggling to turn over the pages without brushing the head of the person in front of you, for example.

But perhaps the most important point is what these new media will be publishing. If publishing a book on line makes it cheaper to produce, will we be inundated with even more substandard trash than we are at the moment? Many people already worry about the kind of information available on the Internet, including the vast supplies of pornography. Will good writing get drowned in the dross or will quality still count?

Shukan ST: April 7, 2000

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