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