Pirates seem to be all the rage these days.  Ever since Napster burst onto the scene last during the last millennium it seems as though every kid on his parents’ computer has become one.  But these pirates aren’t after your booty and aren’t threatening you with sharpened cutlasses and threats of the plank.  They just want a few songs… and maybe a couple episodes of their favorite television show… and, perhaps, a poorly recorded peek at that movie that’s only been out in theatres for a few weeks… and… a Stephen King novel?

I have to admit, I never thought that piracy of books would ever become a problem.  Books are, after all, a very physical medium.  And while e-books have been on the scene for years now, there aren’t many people who want to sit at their computer desk staring at a screen for hours consuming a novel, clicking from page to page.  To most, reading for pleasure involves curling up in a favorite spot under a cozy blanket, relishing the satisfying scraping sound of paper against paper as the steady accumulation of pages builds under their right thumb.

However, change happens.

Two thousand years ago the codex was invented, an invention which would eventually oust the scroll as the primary means of holding written communication.

It seems only fitting that now, two thousand years later, the codex would see the beginning of its own end.

Digital distribution of books is the future.  I don’t say this because I hate paper; I say this because it is a fact.  There will come a day when the dominant form of written communication will break down into ones and zeros.  It happened to music, it happened to movies, and the only reason it’s taking longer for books is because e-book readers cost too much.  The average reader is, at most, only willing to spend (at most) twenty-five dollars on a couple of hardcover books a year.  Add this to fact that e-books demand an additional cost per download, and you have a system that only the avidly reading techno-geek would truly appreciate.

So maybe this change won’t happen soon.  Heck, it took the codex four centuries to beat the scroll.  But the change is coming, trust me.

It used to be that only the rich could own books.  Since each one had to be handwritten and hand stitched, it was a very time consuming, very expensive process.  But along came Guttenberg, and with him, a cheaper way to produce books.  With every leap forward in the technology used to produce books there was a leap backward in price.  Now books are cheap enough to be in every home, cheap enough that more and more authors were allowed to try their hands at this “distribution” thing.  And now we have more books than we can manage about every subject imaginable.

We are still awaiting the Guttenberg jump for digital books.  But it will come.
   
Kindle, Amazon’s e-book reader, isn’t going to change the world.  But it is a harbinger of things to come.  It will probably come when its functionality is grafted onto a multimedia device – something like an iPhone, or a Blackberry, when these types of phone/camera/mp3 player/video player/internet browser devices become more and more the norm.  This device is not beyond our grasp.
   
The change is on our doorsteps… but don’t be afraid.  This is just the next step forward.
   
With digital distribution, the price of producing a book is driven even lower.  It would literally cost only the author’s time plus the amount of space it would take up on a public server.  The possibility this presents for blossoming authors is enormous.  No need to go through an agent or a publisher – content straight from their computers to their readers at a price set by the author.  Success will be measured by the number of dedicated readers an author can find, not by the ability to get a novel published at all.
   
True democracy comes to the publishing world.  Let the people decide who the great authors are.
   
The change is coming.  If you listen closely you can almost hear a swan song from that piece of furniture known as a “bookshelf” as thousands of pages sigh a sweet, if somewhat dissonant, melody.

A new day is coming.  And I, for one, can’t wait to see what it brings.

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