Easy readers: Kindle, iPads more than novel ideas

Sarah Ruml has already given up on paper books. The Kindle is all she needs.

“They’re better than regular books,” Ruml, 38, said of e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle. “They’re lighter, and if you’re trying to get under your covers to read, you can just use one hand. The page doesn’t have that gutter (the space between the edge of the text and the page binding). You can read faster.”

Also: the bookstore is always open, and what you buy doesn’t stack up in the house. “If I own the paper book because I intend to read it,” she said, “I will instead download it on the Kindle.”

The popularity of the Kindle and of Apple’s new iPad mean this might be the first summer in which many people bring an electronic reading device with them to the park or on vacation instead of packing several actual books.

Book sales have declined in each of the last several years, but the e-book market has exploded. The Association of American Publishers reported earlier this month that e-book sales in 2009 were up 176.6 percent over 2008. The iPad will likely drive the 2010 growth even higher.

But if the rise of the e-book is inevitable, what will it change about the way we read? How will books themselves be different?

“I’ve not seen any significant sign of writers changing the way they write,” said Richard Nash, the former publisher of Soft Skull Press whose thoughts on the future of publishing led Utne Reader to name him one of 50 visionaries changing the world. “What I have seen are enormous changes in how writers connect with readers.

“It’s the Twitter-ing novelist: Neil Gaiman and Colson Whitehead and Margaret Atwood and Susan Orlean. The author is not someone you see on a dais once a year at a university or a bookstore where you get 15 seconds with him.”
A radical change

The e-book also increases the number of authors who can make their work available, by going around big publishers and even bookstores.

For small publishers or self-published authors, e-books have vastly reduced the difficulty of reaching an audience, according to Mark Coker, founder of the self-publishing platform Smashwords. “Up until a few years ago, authors really had no choice,” Coker said. “If they wanted to reach an audience, they had to go through that traditional system.”