Textos claves

Chartier, Roger. Del códice a la pantalla: trayectorias de lo escrito. Revista Quimera, número 150, sept. 1996, 43-49

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An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back

An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back
By Sarah Glazer

UNTIL recently, I thought electronic books were sharing a graveyard with eight-track tapes, Betamax video recorders and record players. Industry predictions five years ago that e-books would quickly replace paper never came to pass. I figured the digital book had failed because everyone shared my distaste for the first generation of clunky, book-sized devices designed for viewing them. And in fact Gemstar, the principal manufacturer of the electronic readers, stopped selling them last year.
But it turns out the e-book market has been changing course and, though still tiny, has been growing at double-digit rates. It is, in fact, the fastest-growing segment of the comparatively static publishing world. Between 2002 and 2003, the number of e-books sold rose 71 percent, according to the industry's trade association, the Open eBook Forum. The industry posted record sales in the first quarter of 2004, a 46 percent increase compared with the same period last year. Still, last year's sales of 1.4 million downloadable books are minuscule compared with the more than 2.2 billion books sold in the United States in 2003.
What made this growth possible is a phenomenon the pioneers in the electronic publishing industry didn't foresee: the explosion of cellphones and other hand-held devices with small screens capable of displaying text. About 80 percent of the downloadable books sold to individuals today are read on such devices, according to the two top online electronic retailers, eReader and Fictionwise.
E-book readers use cellphones, ''smart'' phones (which have Web capacity and miniature keyboards), Palm Pilots and other P.D.A.'s (personal digital assistants), and pocket P.C.'s, which are increasingly popular. In minutes, you can purchase and download a digital book suitable for a mobile device or a personal computer from one of several sites that specialize in e-books, as well as from Amazon.com.
Fans of cellphone reading tell me they quickly forget about the size of the screen once they get absorbed in a good plot; moreover, they can increase the type size to make it easier on the eyes. And the convenience is unbeatable. A friend of mine, who had forgotten to bring reading matter to the dentist, recently read Kitty Kelley's book ''The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty'' on his Treo smart phone, then text-messaged a particularly damning paragraph about the Bush family to my cell.
The ubiquity of both P.C.'s and hand-held devices permits some unanticipated uses. One advantage of reading e-books from a monitor at work is ''the ability to appear like you're working, when in fact you are not,'' confesses a Dallas manager for an online retailer who told me he has read hundreds of science fiction and history books this way. When heading for the doctor's office, Janet Cargill, a 75-year-old retiree in Westbrook, Me., loads several romance novels into her hand-held Garmin G.P.S., or global positioning system, which she also relies on to give her voice-activated driving directions.
E-reading may be good for marriages, too. At night, the Palm's backlighted screen permits Miki M. Compson, a computer consultant in Severn, Md., to catch up on the latest James Patterson thriller in the car instead of criticizing her husband's driving. ''For 30 years we've had fights in the car; now I can read my e-book and shut up,'' says Compson, who says she reads up to seven e-books a week on her Palm.
Both Cargill and Compson represent another surprising shift in the e-book market. Retailers say that the market, which used to be dominated by computer-savvy male readers of science fiction, has expanded in the past year or two to include a growing number of female readers. And while science fiction remains a top seller, female romance readers now compose one of the fastest-growing markets for digital books, perhaps because many are voracious readers who race through all the sequels in a series.
One such reader is Rebecca Kroll of Scotch Plains, N.J., a live-in caretaker for an autistic teenager, who says she burns through three or four books a day and purchases 50 to 100 a week, an expensive habit that she says costs her up to $400 weekly. ''Storage is a big issue with me,'' Kroll says. Before she discovered e-books a little over a year ago, 12,000 books crammed her apartment from floor to ceiling, leaving her desperate for more shelf space. Although Kroll says she was initially ill at ease with computers, she now does most of her reading on a laptop and stores thousands of romance and science fiction fantasy novels on two computer disks. Another advantage of the laptop, she says, is that it permits her to listen to e-books that are formatted with a text-to-speech option while she's cooking or knitting.
Kroll also likes the relative anonymity of purchasing e-books from Web sites that specialize in female-oriented erotica, some of them available only in electronic form. ''It's a lot nicer, especially if you're embarrassed to go into a bookstore,'' she says.
E-books have a number of other advantages over print books: they are significantly cheaper -+sometimes by 20 to 50 percent. The best-selling ''Da Vinci Code'' is $12.11 from eReader.com, compared with $14.97 for the print version of the book on Amazon.com, not including shipping. A Palm Pilot can generally hold 10 or 15 books at once, a major convenience when traveling. At 2 a.m., a student with a book report due the next morning could download the assigned book instantaneously from the Web -- which may explain why George Orwell's ''1984'' ($5.99) is the top seller at RosettaBooks, an e-book publisher that specializes in copyrighted 20th-century masterworks. My own introduction to e-books came as I was cramming for my book group's discussion of ''The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.'' I went online to eReader.com and downloaded the Spark Notes, a competitor to Cliffs Notes published by Barnes & Noble. They appeared in an elegant large font on my desktop, and I was surprised at how easy it was to read an entire book in a single sitting, albeit a short one.
E-books are creeping into our world in other ways. Libraries, a potentially huge market, have started to purchase e-books that patrons can download at home. Digital books are a librarian's dream come true, because they don't take up shelf space, don't wear out and are automatically returned to the library on the due date. The New York Public Library introduced its first e-book collection on Nov. 1 with 3,000 titles. ''We put it on the Web site and almost immediately in the middle of the night people started checking them out,'' a library spokeswoman said. The ''Kama Sutra,'' the classic Indian sex manual, was one of the most popular books the first week. The White Plains Public Library, which started lending e-books in mid-August, reports more than more than 200 checkouts a month. Computer technology has been the most popular category, followed by health and fitness and then romance.
But many avid readers -- and I'm one of them -- say they can't see curling up with a laptop or a P.D.A. in bed. (Fans counter that the backlight permits them to read without disturbing a sleeping spouse.) Most e-books from major publishers are encrypted to prevent printing out even a page. Random House, the largest publisher of electronic titles, does not permit any printing from its books; HarperCollins Publishers permits 10 percent of a book to be printed out. That limitation reduces the market to those who are comfortable reading long books on a screen.
Increasingly, e-booksellers are persuading publishers to release best sellers in digital form. This fall, eReader made Stephen King's best-selling ''Dark Tower'' available for download one minute after midnight on the day of its print release. But best-selling authors like John Grisham, Tom Clancy and J. K. Rowling are still not available electronically. The continuing reluctance of some publishers and prominent authors to grant electronic rights is a major obstacle to the market's growth, industry executives complain. And the number of new titles remains low. Random House leads the pack with 2,500 electronic titles among all its imprints, but that's still small compared with the 24,000 books in its print catalog.
Some authors fear e-book sales will cut into the sales of print copies. Others are worried that it will be easier to make pirate copies and distribute them, the way the free Internet music site Napster did before it was declared illegal by a federal court and shut down. Retailers counter that most pirating is actually done from print books, which are easy to scan quickly into a computer.
Already a culture war reminiscent of the one surrounding Napster is shaping up in the world of digital books. My college-age son is in the contingent that reads e-books almost exclusively from free Web sites because of the greater flexibility offered by their unencrypted books. Such sites usually offer plain-text format, which allows him to print as many pages as he needs, or to copy a long quotation from a book electronically and paste it into his term paper. Free sites, at least the legitimate ones, are limited to books for which the copyright has expired. Yet they are popular, especially among students assigned classic works. The University of Virginia library, which makes 1,800 titles available free from its Web site, has sent more than 8.5 million downloadable books to readers since it started the service in August 2000.
Some believe that all e-books should be free of software protection limits. Cory Doctorow, an advocate for less restrictive digital rights at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, made his first novel available free online. He argues that digital content's unique forms of adaptability -- to e-mail, computerized cut-and-paste and software translation engines -- are all areas where paper books lag. In his view, anyone who puts a software lock on an e-book is crazy.
The market's biggest hurdle right now may be that most people have never even seen an e-book -- at least not one with a price tag. Yet more people are reading more words from screens every day, which some would argue is equivalent to reading a digital book. The popularity of Apple's iTunes Web site for purchasing downloaded music indicates that ''people are getting used to buying digital content without a physical copy,'' notes Theresa Horner, director of e-book operations and business development at HarperCollins. Now consumers just need the equivalent of an iPod for digital books, she says.
Still, the prospect of reading an e-book on a screen can seem tiring after a workday spent in front of a computer. A reading device easier on the eyes might attract more readers. One such prospect is Sony's Librié -- a lighter, thinner reading device than the Gemstar, with resolution close to that of this newspaper and a glare-free surface that can be read at any angle, even in bright light. It is currently available only in Japan. American consumers may see a product using the new technology in the next 18 to 24 months, says Darren Bischoff, senior marketing manager of the E Ink Corporation, the Cambridge, Mass., company that developed the technology known as electronic ink. Several companies are interested in developing a product for the United States market, Bischoff says. It's unclear whether that will be a device only capable of reading downloaded books or a multifaceted device like a P.D.A.
Even with a technological breakthrough, I'd personally miss the feel of holding a ''dead tree book,'' as the digital generation calls the paper version. Many of us aren't convinced that reading off a screen even approaches the sensual pleasure of turning crisp pages. Then again, I had to be dragged kicking and screaming from my I.B.M. electric typewriter, but I can't imagine relying on white-out now. And how did we all survive before Google?
For almost any objection raised by old-fashioned readers, there's already an electronic answer. You can electronically annotate notes in the margins, bookmark a page or look up a word in your downloaded dictionary. What is more, technology companies like E Ink are already developing a thin, flexible material for displaying print that could be rolled up like a newspaper or folded into a briefcase. That, of course, is for readers still nostalgic for papyrus.

E-Book Top Ten
1. Angels & Demons, Dan Brown, Pocket Books
2. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown, Doubleday
3. Hour Game, David Baldacci, Warner Books
4. Split Second, David Baldacci, Warner Books
5. A Lady of His Own, Stephanie Laurens, HarperCollins
6. Deception Point, Dan Brown, Pocket Books
7. The Big Bad Wolf, James Patterson, Time Warner
8. The Templar Revelation, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, Touchstone
9. Digital Fortress, Dan Brown, St. Martin's
10. Secrets of a Summer Night, Lisa Kleypas, HarperCollins
Source:Open eBook Forum

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Novelas por teléfono

BOOM EN JAPÓN
EFE
TOKIO.- La gran popularidad alcanzada entre los jóvenes por una novela romántica publicada únicamente en los teléfonos móviles, ha despertado el interés de las operadoras de telefonía y del propio mundo editorial, que se ha volcado a esta nueva modalidad de literatura para salvarse de la fuerte caída de ventas de libros.

'Deep Love' (Amor profundo) es el título de una de las primeras novelas románticas publicadas exclusivamente para leerse en las micropantallas de los teléfonos móviles, cuyo éxito ha quedado demostrado al haber sido 'leída' por algo más de 20 millones de personas en el portal electrónico, informa el corresponsal de EFE en Japón Junko Takahashi.
Su arrollador triunfo llevó incluso a sus autores a editarla en el formato impreso tradicional y sus protagonistas se inmortalizaron además en la consiguiente película.

A pesar de que la supuesta enemistad entre las novelas para los móviles y las editoriales conservadoras, el éxito de 'Deep Love' abrió los ojos de los editores de libros ya que éstos se enfrentan a una imparable caída de ventas de la literatura impresa.

Tecnología contra papel

Según la Asociación Japonesa de Editoriales, la facturación de libros y revistas lleva cayendo por una pendiente imparable siete años consecutivos, y en 2003 llegó a ser un 20% menor que la del año anterior.

Se considera que la principal razón del alejamiento del público de los libros es la creciente difusión de Internet y la telefonía móvil.

Pese a sus reticencias, las editoriales se han unido a la tendencia para aprovechar ambos medios en un intento de restaurar la grave situación que padecen.

Novelas-series

Cuando un lector tiene acceso a los servicios editoriales de un portal de Internet, donde se exponen hasta 20 novelas de variedad de géneros, desde novelas románticas hasta policíacas, puede seleccionar todo lo que quiera por 300 yenes (unos 2,7 dólares) al mes.

Las novelas se publican en una serie diaria o semanal, con unas 2.000 letras en cada entrega, y con un sistema automático para retomar la lectura en el lugar dejado en último lugar, que evita las engorrosas búsquedas.

La editorial Shincho, una de las principales de Japón, considera positivo la existencia de novelas para los teléfonos móviles, ya que ha conseguido 30.000 abonados a su servicio desde que lo lanzó hace dos años.

"Las personas que más utilizan los teléfonos móviles son las mujeres, las adolescentes y de 30 años de edad. Y en realidad, el 70% de nuestros abonados son mujeres de esa generación, por eso ellas son nuestro objetivo," dijo a EFE Takuo Murase, portavoz de la editorial Shincho.

Simples y fáciles de leer

Aparentemente la clave del éxito de las "móvilnovelas" está en sus frases simples y contenidos fáciles.

"Una novela así debe ser fácil de leer, ya que si el contenido es tan complicado que obligue a volver a la página anterior para releer, como contenido no sirve para los móviles", añadió Murase.

Así, las novelas históricas que reflejan muchos nombres propios y una historia complicada, no son adecuadas para leer en los móviles. "Las novelas de los portátiles son tan sólo una mercancía más para pasar el tiempo", explicó Murase.

Sin embargo, las novelas policíacas han demostrado tener bastante éxito, y también las románticas, que consiguen muchos "accesos" debido al gran número de las lectoras.

Falta de tiempo

Esta forma de lectura se ha adaptado como anillo al dedo a los nuevos estilos de vida de la gente moderna, no dispuesta a malgastar tiempo.

Según una encuesta de la editorial Shincho, la gente lee la "literatura móvil" en el metro y antes de dormir en la cama, gracias a la luz propia de la micropantalla del teléfono móvil, lo que permite leer en la oscuridad sin molestar al vecino, o incluso mientras se lleva al bebe en brazos.

A pesar de que ciertos escritores rechazan las novelas para móviles por su simplicidad, argumentando que prescinden del verdadero sabor de la literatura, basado en la riqueza de la variedad de expresiones, las novelas de móviles son un desafío para las editoriales con el que esperan recobrar a los lectores.

"En la actualidad, la generación de lectores está envejeciendo y muy pocos jóvenes leen libros. Con las novelas para móviles creo que por lo menos los adolescentes se podrán acostumbrar a leer literatura. Y así su interés se extenderá luego hasta los libros impresos," comentó Murase.