Apple eBooks will be made available from the iBookstore. It still looks like a bookshelf though.

Tech pundits are predicting the death of print within the next decade as a plethora of eBook readers – now including Apple – make print unnecessary. But does redundant mean it’s unwanted?

The eagerly-awaited Apple tablet, iPad, was dropped yesterday at an exclusive invite only press conference hosted by Apple CEO Steve Jobs. While most tech-junkies were disappointed that the device did not sport a camera, USB port, Flash capabilities or multitasking, they did welcome Apple’s entry into the eBook reader market. While the book reading app is beautiful, as most apps are, it will be limited, as most apps are. Doubts as to whether the iPad will kill Kindle have not been settled despite the reader sporting the Kindle app. Yet unlike the Kindle the iPad reserves the whole screen for text, leaves a progress bar at the bottom allowing you to see how far into the book you are and also bears a page curling animation to turn the page – almost exactly like a real book.

The device has re-inspired the “eBook will be the death of print” debate. While the nifty reader is prettier than the kindle, in full colour and sports an application that makes your eBooks look like they’re housed in a real bookcase, it’s still an onscreen simulation trying to be the real thing. Like all eBook readers, the iPad competes with print by copying its actions.

Print has been saying its long goodbye since the first radio broadcast in 1906/7, when media gurus began crying the redundancy of print now that news broadcast could be sent directly to your living room instead of to your door. Now 104 years later and it seems only Dan Brown is more popular in eBook form than in print – which (could be for any number of reasons) is more likely a result of the huge online Twitter semiotics game as a lead up to the The Lost Symbol.

For sure digital offers more to readers: “ubiquity, speed, permanence, searchability, the ability to update, the ability to remix, targeting, interaction, marketing via links, data feedback” (Business Week) but I quite enjoy the fact that my books don’t come with popup ads. I can’t remember the last time I needed to search a novel or required that it be updated and I certainly enjoy the difference between onscreen reading and reading a book as a nice defining line between work and relaxation. The benefits of onscreen reading are all utilitarian but very rarely aesthetic – an appeal of the book that enables countless secondhand bookstores to remain in existence.

While the draw for publishers to make books available in eBook form is certainly cheaper to produce and easier to distribute, it will have an effect on the way content is written. Any author, journalist and perhaps even blogger will tell you how different onscreen material must be written to be appealing to an audience, and no matter how many inches the screen has it’s still a screen. A generation of lazy writers who can correct their mistakes or update it later is perhaps not what the publishing industry needs. It certainly doesn’t need more blogger crossovers or poorly thought out prose.

Despite Stephen Fry’s opinion that the iPad is beautiful, it pales in comparison to an 1891 original copy of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles or even a 2009 embellished hardcover copy of Paradise Lost. Like all things technology, new doesn’t always mean old is obsolete: as Business Week mentions “nothing ever goes away completely” as Java proves.

While the book reading toys are a great accessory and much lighter than transporting a varsity sack full of encyclopaedias, it won’t put print to death – if only for the sake of having books decorate your home.

By Jason Esch

Eoin Colfer "Being given the chance to write this book is like suddenly being offered the superpower of your choice." – Eoin Colfer Eoin Colfer "Being given the chance to write this book is like suddenly being offered the superpower of your choice." – Eoin Colfer

Not unheard of, the idea of writing sequels of another author’s work is not in breach of copyright with the correct permission of a close relative and grace of the publisher. You need think only of Scarlett, Alexandra Ripley’s sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and more recently, Sebastian Faulks (author of Birdsong) bringing Fleming’s Bond back to life.

If Barthes is correct and meaning is in the reader, then the switch to a new author shouldn’t disrupt the series, as Douglas Adams’ followers hope. Author of the popular Artemis Foul series, Eoin (pronounced Owen) Colfer releases the sixth installment of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy today – And Another Thing….

Adams noted before his death in May 2001, that he had hoped to add to the series and finish it on a more upbeat note than Mostly Harmless. With permission from widow Jane Belson, Colfer brings Aurthur Dent, Zaphod Beeblebrox, Ford Perfect and Trillian to life once more.

While Colfer’s audience is ordinarily the eight- to 13-year-old group, he has no problem accessing the same wide audience as Adams with his references to the Hitchhiker’s Guide and British wit turned Irish comic. Available now in hardback, And Another Thing… combines the same science-fiction, humour and human elements to prove that the author is never really dead.

For more information on the book and the series, visit it’s official website.

by Jason Esch

In the wake of atrocities perpetrated in the name of nation and race, individuals were forced to form their identities not only without but against these categories – Herta Müller

As a minority German-speaking Romanian forced into emigration at the hands of oppressive leader Ceausescu’s Securitate, Herta Müller is perfectly positioned to capture the cruelty of those divested of their national identity and displaced by autocracy. Through her prose and poetry, Müller details the harsh conditions of Romanian ethnic Germans in Communist Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu as well as persecution by a Stalinist Soviet.

After completing her studies in Romanian and German literature at the Timişoara University, Müller worked as a translator for an engineering factory, but was later dismissed for refusing to be recruited as an informant for the Communist regime’s secret police. Later forced to leave the country as a result of political pressure and threats by the Securitate, Müller and her husband relocated to Germany where she became double outsider, using a minority language to expose fascism, intolerance and corruption.

Her novel Hertzier (or Land of Green Plums) recounts in fiction the issues faced by writers and the governments determined to censor them. After more than 20 literary awards, a few translations into English, the minority writer eloquently exposes the vampirism of tyranny by winning the 2009 Nobel Prize for literature.

Click here to read an excerpt from Müller’s Everything I won I Carry With Me.

By Jason Esch