LUCIDMEDIA

Uniting the eBook and the iPhone: Marketing Genius or High-Speed Culture Run Amuck?

Written by Nadine Bachan Monday, 06 April 2009 10:10

We’ve all come to expect to see the new Apple commercial every now and again. Recently, iPhone’s current ad campaign has included a showcase of all the different “apps” you can download and use. Heaven forbid you use a mobile to make, dare I say, just phone calls.

Oh no. Now you can, nay — should, play games, surf the web, learn a new language, balance your chequebook, and who-knows what else.  Basically, by purchasing an iPhone, you can organize, improve, and spice up your apparently messy and dull life without ever having to look up from its little touchscreen. Now, lo and behold, you can use it to upload and read books with its new eReader app. It seems popular culture has finally caught on to the eBook, an evolutionary new medium that has the potential to significantly change books and reading as we know it.

Only a couple of years ago the eReader was introduced, a hand-held electronic tablet meant solely for the purpose of reading eBooks. Sony was the first to develop an eBook device, the LIBRIé, which came out of the Japanese market and is currently only available with a Japanese GUI (which is short for graphic user interface — meaning you would have to be able to read Japanese for it to be of any use to you). Certain developers are working on creating translation firmware for the device.  If you don’t want to wait on the LIBRIé, other eReaders have been developed since then, including the iLiad (by iRex Technologies), the Hanlin eReader (by Tianjin Jinke Electronics) and the Sony Reader, which is much less complex than the LIBRIé, but does the job. The Amazon Kindle is, in fact, one of the interfaces downloadable as an app on the all-encompassing iPhone.

The eReader, in itself, is a great step forward for literature in general. These simple gadgets can hold hundreds of eBooks-worth of memory and are as easy to use as the light stroke of your finger. There are flaws (all new products have their share of kinks and bugs to sort out), but as technology improves, the possibilities can be endless as we may be able to view all sorts of facsimiles: quick and easy access to new releases; first editions of your favourite books; ancient texts and scrolls; and maybe, one day, even handwritten pages penned by history’s greatest writers.

Apparently, as lovely as the gadget is, it wasn’t enough to be a market breakthrough nor enough to convince all authors and publishers to accommodate the new medium. For example, J.K. Rowlings has expressed that there will be no e-editions of her Harry Potter series. On top of that, in today’s fast-paced, get-up-and-go society, the idea of an eReader is not a “smart” purchase and simply not considered good marketing. After all, an eBook viewer is JUST an eBook viewer. Today, people are all about multitasking and devices that can handle it. Multitasking has taken over urban life and has gotten a bit out of control. Where are the days when it was perfectly alright to spend your lunch hour just eating your lunch? Now, you’re either on your cell phone, running errands, or working away on your laptop, or perhaps doing all three. Where would a single-function device fit in?

So, do the eReader apps for the iPhone mean better times for the eBook? Maybe. If anything, it may increase interest in and acceptance of electronic texts, and perhaps create a serious market for the eBook and its accompanying hand-held devices. All in all though, I would prefer to have a simple, single function device like the Sony Reader over an iPhone with apps. Maybe it’s just me, but I still enjoy the time spent sitting quietly — without distraction — and just reading a book. Paper or electronic? Let’s hope that will be a choice more easily available to all of us.