Battle lines

May 30, 2009
The clash of the old and new forces in the world of books. By Geoff Collett. --------------------
An unseen radio is blaring somewhere in the depths of the Baigent Workshop at Founders Heritage Park. National Radio host Jim Mora is banging on, promo-ing his latest giveaway competition for a "great pile of books".
Well, nice try Jim, but you won't be getting much interest in these parts today. His great pile might be overshadowed by what's to be found crammed into the workshop building and flowing into the cavernous Energy Centre building next door: probably the greatest, biggest pile of books you'll see - tens of thousands of them, but more readily counted by the banana-box-full (1600) or tonne (35), although even those are best guesses.
They are all destined for the annual Founders Book Fair, the year's main fundraising event for the heritage park and one of the country's biggest second- hand book sales. They also, it could be said, stand as a mighty monument to the printed word: a vast and vaguely unsettling reminder of the pervasiveness of the book but also of its mortality.
All of them have been donated by past owners, and are sorted throughout the year by a small core of volunteers. One of them, David Hay, swears that he never tires of the sight of books, nor the smell, although he admits that he doesn't read many from cover to cover these days, instead dipping in and out the thousands of volumes that pass through the workshop, to gauge and judge the more promising ones before they are sorted for sale.
The book fair opened this morning and will continue for a week. Based on past years' experience, today will be by far the busiest. There are gems to be mined on the 100 trestle tables set up throughout the Energy Centre. There is also a lot that should never have darkened a printing press.
The organisers are non-judgmental, but they get to know what's good, what's timeless, and what's not. Lately, they've been troubled by the number of encyclopaedias coming through - whole sets that were once "just the thing", as Hay puts it, but are all but useless in the digital age.
They have gone the way of the collected speeches of Lord Cobham, a former governor-general whose pronouncements were sufficiently popular in their day to be compiled and published into a volume which was, judging by the number of copies that surface at Founders, widely purchased. Or the thousands of Mills and Boon titles churned out over the years, most, Hay suspects, never intended to be read more than once, but which the book fair gallantly seeks to on-sell for 20 cents a pop - same as the bottomless well of Reader's Digest Condensed Books.
There aren't many questions about the book fair that stump Hay. The popular stuff for people to donate (other than Lord Cobham's speeches) tends to be sporting biographies (Fergie McCormack's and Jeremy Coney's come to mind) and an early book about Kiri Te Kanawa; the popular stuff for people to buy is led by paperback fiction, but also local histories, gardening and cooking.
Even Mills and Boon has hidden treasures: apparently, a long-since deceased New Zealand author, Essie Summers, is perennially popular. If you spot one of her titles on the 20-cent table, your luck is in. Enid Blyton, too - author of such dubious classics as Noddy and the Famous Five - lives on in some hearts. "We can still sell Enid Blyton in any condition, " Hay says, whether to collectors, or parents hoping to pass their childhood love to offspring.
Some valuable books may be sold through a specialist auction, and while Hay makes no apologies for Founders seeking to maximise the value out of such donations when they do arise, he does acknowledge a little bit of sensitivity: "People get concerned that Nelson books might be going somewhere else."
Almost all, though, will go to a new home in Nelson. Nelsonians, it seems, love their books. The city's library membership is among the highest in the land. And, by the end of next week, if last year's experience is any guide, they could be expected to have spent $100,000 at the Founders Book Fair. One of the best things about the book sale, Hay reflects, is that it is "an intrinsically enjoyable experience". People find neat things and pay a pittance for the privilege of taking them home.
And, no, he's not perturbed by the low, still distant but unavoidable rumbling that underpins any talk of books these days: the sense that the printed, paper version of the things is on borrowed time. The digital world, nobody should be surprised, is determined to swallow books, just as it has with music and video. It may be still figuring out how to digest them, but there seems no doubt that the time is imminent. But Hay is happy to be a sceptic. "There's some things you just can't do with a computer, " he says.
From his office in Auckland, Martin Taylor could almost be scripting those words as the doubter's lament. But don't mistake Taylor for a sceptic; to the contrary, he is in the vanguard of the New Zealand publishing industry's attempts to hitch itself to the runaway juggernaut of digitalisation, recognising the inevitability that he sees and the opportunities he is convinced it presents.
Taylor is sure that the book (or the p-book, for paper book, as the tech- jargon now has it) is likely to be around for many decades to come. But he knows even more certainly that enormous change lies not far ahead.
In a few weeks, he - as director of the New Zealand Digital Publishing Forum, which is backed by about 80 of the country's publishers - will be hosting the country's first formal conference to address the "future of the book".
"The future of the book is digital, mobile and global, " the conference programme announces. "The changes sweeping this US$100 billion global industry . . . promise the biggest change in how we read since the invention of the printing press."
For now, nobody is quite sure just how that will play out. And for those who dip in and out of the story of digital publishing, it would be easy to get plot-lines confused and characters mixed up. After all, we have philanthropists and libraries seeking to capture large chunks of the world's printed output in digital form, with a dream of making it freely and universally available for anyone with an internet connection; mega-corporations doing the same, but for less selfless reasons; websites dedicated to publishing "books" in digital-only format, turning their backs on the printed page; traditional publishers bundling up electronic versions of their blockbusters and offering them for sale to your computer or cellphone; and various technology heavyweights scrapping over devices designed to make reading from a screen as close to the experience of reading from a printed page as the human eye can detect.
That's the obvious stuff, anyway. Every one of those forces unleashes a wave of others and only the brave or the reckless will be leaping to judgment about where it might end up. It's still a landscape for pioneers. Format wars are still being waged, to settle which technology will prevail for storing, reading and sharing ebooks.
The percentage share of the total books market claimed by digital formats is still in low single figures, even in the United States; in New Zealand, it is almost non-existent. Taylor points out that various publishers, including the local operations of the big four international houses (Penguin, Random House, HarperCollins and Hachette) are producing ebooks here, but few are sold and they have an eye on the future. Otherwise, his summary of the consumer activity in this country is, "very, very little".
The two heavyweights trying to come up with a mass-market purpose-built electronic reader, Sony and the American online retailer Amazon, have no plans to offer their devices for sale here, or in most minor markets, while they are still trying to crack places such as America and Britain.
"We've been talking to Sony and hoping that we can encourage them to come sooner rather than later, " Taylor says. So far, it's no dice.
The forum's major short-term aim is to rally the New Zealand publishing industry behind developing a "digital warehouse" - an electronic holding pen where digital versions of their products can be stored and formatted ready for sale when Kiwis do start to embrace the possibility of buying books as electronic files rather than paperbacks.
Taylor says there is a "fair bit of buy-in" from the publishing industry. The strategy is "making it easy for suppliers like retailers and device manufacturers to come in and access the content", he says. "The objective at the moment is to have that capability and have a reasonably committed portfolio of New Zealand ebooks within the year."
That would be only the wholesale end of the market positioned for action. The retail side - and consumers - require a whole different set of cat-herding skills. The book chain Dymocks was expected to be first out with kiosks in its stores where customers could download ebooks to reading devices - whether a smartphone, memory stick or dedicated reader - but it dropped the plan a couple of months ago.
Taylor remains optimistic. "There is certainly some indication that we could have the capability - and I'm talking about buying New Zealand titles or titles from a New Zealand domiciled ebook store - I would think within the 12-month period."
Taylor counsels against getting too wrapped up in the hype over purpose-designed ebook readers such as Amazon's much-publicised Kindle. His pick is that most consumers will be happy to rely on the coming generations of smartphones and similar devices, which will offer long battery life, easy portability and new screen technology which makes reading text - or viewing video, or playing games - entirely satisfactory.
"The technologies that we need to make a good reading platform, I think, are going to be built into devices that people will want for other parts of their life, " he predicts.
He counsels, too, against the old tendency of assuming that the shift is going to be sudden or complete. "What people often think is that it's 100 per cent or nothing, but that's not the way the world works." Paperbacks will be with us for decades to come, he is sure, for those who prefer it that way.
It could also be suggested that there's the hint of the utopian in his vision - of a New Zealand with the sort of permanent, cheap, wireless connectivity familiar in the US or Asian powerhouses, which provides the platform for any society to go properly digital.
Amazon's Kindle, Taylor points out, works on the American cellular network where data can be carried for negligible prices - 12USc a megabyte. In New Zealand right now, he says, if you downloaded 1MB of data to your smartphone, you might pay your cellular provider $30 - the entire cost of buying a new paperback at Whitcoulls.
But if things like telecoms companies may appear to be immovable objects, the irresistible force on its way is the mounting appetite for people to receive information in all its shapes and forms digitally. "When people are given a choice, they will consume media digitally, " Taylor says.
But why is somebody like Taylor - who also works in the field of traditional publishing - so keen to see the digital world come crashing through the bookshelves of the land?
There could be many answers, but his preferred one is that he, like others on his crusade, are here to save the book, not to bury it.