The brave new book
Call it e-book 2.0.
``2.0" is Internet speak for: ``We botched everything pre-2001, but this time we're going to get it right." And if there was anything the webheads got wrong in the late 20th century, it was electronic books.
Who can forget the hype attending ``electronic readers" like the $600 SoftBook and the $1,500 EB Dedicated Reader , which were going to make paper-and-paste books obsolete? The chief executive of SoftBook called his product a ``booklike experience," perhaps one of the great euphemisms of the digital age.
Now the e-book may have a second shot.
The new hype differs from the old hype. Everyone acknowledges that the boxy readers like SoftBook bombed. Now the e-bookies insist the Game Boy generation wants to read books on their tiny iPod or cellphone screens. ``You wouldn't believe how many people read books on their PDAs [personal digital assistants]," says Gutenberg founder Michael Hart. OK, how many? He has no idea.
The most literate exchange on the future of the book occurred late last month, between Wired magazine writer Kevin Kelly and Beverly's own John Updike . In a
Speaking later to a booksellers convention, Updike called Kelly's vision ``a pretty grisly scenario." Men and women caressing the pages of calf-bound masterpieces ``are approaching the condition of holdouts," Updike said, ``surly hermits refusing to come out and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village." You should listen to the speech at bookexpocast.com , if only for the references to Harvard Square's Grolier and Mandrake bookstores.
As it happens, the e-book is the solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Check out my Personalized Literacy Unit, a 2003 release from the Bantam Dell labs. It's an $8 paperback called ``Persuader " by Lee Child , and it weighs the same as my stripped-down cellphone and less than my Palm Pilot . (A friend's reaction upon learning that I carry a Pilot: ``How 1997!") I've used my PLU on an airplane, in the car, and in a few other places where you wouldn't take electronic equipment.
I am giving the last word on this subject to Cambridge's director of libraries, Susan Flannery . Instead of theorizing about libraries and the future of the book, Flannery and her board are building a new, $60 million main branch to provide state-of-the-art library services for the next 20 years. Barely a mile from Flannery's office, Google is scanning the books in Harvard's libraries for eventual inclusion in Kevin Kelly's ``liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas."
So what's Flannery up to? ``In planning for the new library, the rule of thumb is to plan for what we know and then to plan for being wrong," she says. ``The building has to be as flexible as possible to anticipate things that none of us know about." The new library, designed by architects William Rawn and Ann Beha , will have a ``computer commons" and will be rigged with Internet jacks and wireless computer connections.
Flannery calls herself ``a big fan of the printed book" who now does more ``reading" of audio books on her iPod than between hard covers. ``I am part of a transitional generation," she says. What about digital books? ``I would think the reference collections would be target number one for being replaced by electronic sources. We are prepared to reduce their shelf space accordingly."
But some publishing trends favor print, she notes. ``Graphic novels are a whole new publishing area that is purely print. They're very popular, and the category seems to be growing. I don't think electronics will replace children's books -- their visual beauty won't translate to the screen, and parents want the kids sitting on their lap.
``And I very much doubt that somebody is going to want to Google a novel." At least not for the next 20 years.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
