Imagine this: it’s 2018, and you’re gripped by the latest political thriller by JK Rowling. (Didn’t she start out writing children’s books? Who can remember now?) You scarcely want to break off to do the washing-up or have a shower. So you don’t. You just tell your e-book reader to read it to you for a while, then, when you’ve finished, you go back to it yourself. Later, you wonder if this part wasn’t a little different in the movie. At a click of a button, you’re watching the film. Or there’s a dramatic scene - a whispered conversation at a concert. You’re given the option to hear the concert music as you read. For attentive fans, the novelist has decided this piece should be one referenced ear-lier. Novels are changing, and Amazon’s Kindle e-reader is just the start.

There is scepticism about this change in the publishing world, and a lot of fear. I’m a writer who straddles two genres - I write online games as well as literary novels - so my less technologically literate novelist friends often ask me, with trepidation, whether the new technologies mean the end of the traditional novel. Publishers also look nervously at the experience of the music and video industries. According to a survey by Ipoque, a German company, 20% of internet users are taking advantage of file-sharing technologies: programmes that allow them to easily download television, music and movies without having to pay the copyright-holder for the privilege. If the percentage of readers who are downloading books for free is much lower - and it almost certainly is - it might only be because a cheap, easy-to-use ebook reader has yet to hit the market. The final instalment of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, had been scanned and was available for download from file-sharing sites at least 24 hours before its official release. If an ebook reader had been widely available, who would have bought the book?

Kate Pullinger, author and writer for digital media, says she can understand the fear. “Our culture is in love with the book,” she says. “It is an artefact of huge cultural significance. Writers don’t want to lose that - they think that if they do, they will lose their livelihoods. Yet I’ve come to believe good writing will survive beyond the book.” Internet downloads haven’t stopped musicians from making music - and the ease with which bedroom artists can make recordings public has brought new talent to light. In fact, for those prepared to embrace new technologies, the creative possibilities of the ebook are exciting. In the last six months of 2007, 50% of the bestselling novels in Japan were originally released as page-per-day serials sent direct to mobile phones. According to Wired magazine, Magic iLand, a site that allows users to write and download mobile-phone novels, plans to release “software that allows phone novelists to integrate sounds and images into their story lines”.

This is where it gets interesting, creatively. I write online “alternate reality” games, which blend different kinds of media to tell a story. Part of the story might appear in a blog, part on a Facebook page, or on the website of a fictional company, or in the comments for a YouTube video. The ebook creates the possibility of a “book with benefits” - a novel that automatically links you to a discussion forum, a history book that includes interesting material for which there was no space in the finished volume. It’s even more revolutionary than that, though: the ebook could be a whole new art form.

Imagine, for example, a novel designed to take advantage of the features of the new must-have geek hipster accessory: the iPhone. When you download a new novel to your iPhone, the calendar might automatically remind you it’s the birthday of one of the characters in a few days’ time, or you might get access to the appointments schedule of the missing journalist in your thriller. The weather-forecast widget could give you the option to view the weather in London in 1880, the setting for your historical romance. Or your purchase of one of those classic Harry Potters could add The Daily Prophet to your automatic newspaper subscriptions. Stories could become pervasive: when you’re lost in a good book, your whole online world could blend seamlessly with it. The technology to do all this doesn’t exist yet, but it’s far from impossible.

Of course, all that additional content will have to be written. Therein lies one of the problems. As Adrian Hon, chief creative of the online games company Six to Start, says: “Authors don’t need to be great artists or programmers right now. They ‘just’ need to write. To make anything more advanced than a normal story, though, you need more skills.” Most authors aren’t also computer programmers, and most programmers aren’t novelists. As Hon says: “Web people come up with cool ideas, such as telling stories by web 2.0 series, wikis or e-mails. Twitter, but it fails because they can’t write a good story for it.” This needn’t be an insuperable hurdle. We may see a new partnership added to the traditional artist-and-writer combination for illustrated books, or musician-and-writer team for songs. Writers could work with programmers in this new form of storytelling.

Just as television hasn’t, despite predictions, killed radio, and photography didn’t stop us from appreciating paintings, there will probably always be a place for the paperbacknovel. Jeremy Ettinghausen, digital publisher at Penguin, with whom I’m working on a forthcoming online storytelling project, www.pengrin.co.uk , says: “The paper book is great technology, cheap to manufacture and purchase, readable under a range of conditions and with superb battery life. I don’t think it will disappear any time soon.” Yet, he continues: “Writers and publishers together have an amazing opportunity to invent ways of engaging readers and telling stories not possible 200, 20 or even two years ago. We need to embrace this.”

Just as internet distribution of music has enabled any musician with a computer to make their work available online, novelists might in future choose to do without a publisher, or to employ one only for its bespoke marketing or PR expertise. After all, if distribution is free and production costs are practically nonexistent, why would a brilliant author allow a publisher to keep 90% of the cost price of his or her novel? Arguably, however, with the barriers to publication lowered, the role of publishers will become even more important to readers – to sift out the good literature from more amateurish attempts.

This is all speculation. The Kindle isn’t likely to revolutionise our book-reading habits and ways of writing just yet. And many of these theoretically possible technological advances may not pan out. Yet, 10 years ago, nobody saw the iPod coming. The e-book will change the book world: it is just a question of when, and how. NA

Come the evolution...

Opt for sound effects

Click on a Nigella e-book recipe and get ingredients added to your online grocery order

Don’t worry about library opening hours for academic research. You’ll be able to download precious texts. And make notes in the margins

Switch between print version, audiobook and movie, getting automatic summaries of boring bits

Be part of a virtual book group: comment on a passage and instantly share your thoughts with everyone else reading. If the author agrees with a criticism, they can revise their text

Go deep: want a detailed image of the Madonna of the Rocks while reading The Da Vinci Code? One click will bring it up

How it works

Is the Kindle actually user-friendly, or is it just another electronic gadget to compound our ever-growing litany of migraines, eye strain and carpal-tunnel syndrome? Without a doubt, the biggest problem facing Amazon in creating its e-reader was always going to be the screen. After all, we’ve been able to read large blocks of prose on our home computers for years, and not many people have found it a comfortable experience. It is certainly no substitute for having that Penguin in your hands.

After reading Tom Perrotta’s fine new novel, The Abstinence Teacher, on my Kindle, (I’m in the United States, the only place where you can get a Kindle at the moment), I found the device gratifyingly similar to reading a traditional book. This is primarily because the Kindle is not backlit. You need ambient light to read it, just as you do a book or newspaper. The result is a much more mellow experience, with no glare or pulsating images. The typeface is high- resolution and generously spaced, and its size can be adjusted for the myopic (or the eagle-eyed). Pages are turned by clicking bars that are positioned ambidextrously. Because the pages are much smaller than in a traditional book, I found the number of times I had to click annoying, though I imagine anyone accustomed to text messaging will not even notice the effort required. There is a useful dictionary function that provides definitions for every word in a highlighted line of text. The battery lasts for up to a week if your wireless connection is turned off; roughly two days if it is on.

Less user-friendly is the mechanism for inserting margin notes. These do not appear within the text, but must be opened and closed independently. Another vexing aspect of the Kindle is that I was never sure exactly where I was in the book. Granted, a line of dots along the bottom of the screen gives you a rough approximation of your progress, but it is simply not the same as holding a book in your hands. I imagine I’d grow used to this sense of dislocation, but for now it left me feeling oddly adrift in the narrative.

That said, I found the actual reading experience to be largely positive. Where it scores over other e-readers is that it is surprisingly similar to reading a traditional book (or paperback, to be more precise: the Kindle weighs just over 10oz and is a mere 5in x 7½in). For all the talk about “revolutions” in reading, what is perhaps most notable about the finished product is how far its designers have gone to approximate the experience of the book, rather than fundamentally changing the way we read. In fact, physically, the Kindle is less a break with the book than an evolution in its development, just as the contemporary paperback is a progression from Roman wax codices.

What’s causing all the excitement is the connectedness of the Kindle. For now, content is available only through a dedicated wireless connection to Amazon’s “virtual library” — 100,000 titles to date, and rising. You place your order, your credit card is charged and your “content” delivered within a minute. (The device can hold the equivalent of more than 200 books at a time.) There is an e-mail service, but this is for loading personal documents into the device. In the future, when the device is fully connected to the internet, one can imagine having access to all manner of unregulated content. The prospect might be exciting for readers, but it is daunting for the writer, who is in danger of losing control of his work, just as musicians are losing control of theirs. The Rolling Stones might be able to take that hit; most working novelists cannot.

It is also possible to envision the Kindle causing a change in the nature of the literary text itself. Instead of the traditional flat accumulation of letters, one can imagine a page that is riven with all manner of links to Google or Wikipedia. The novel will wind up looking like your average blog. For instance, the novelist mentions that his hero is peering down into the Grand Canyon, and the reader need only click on those words to be given the same panoramic view. Or listen to a snippet of a symphony, or watch archival news footage. Or even, perish the thought, text a question or a critical response to the author.

Prospects such as this, rather than in the actual experience of reading the Kindle, are what have caused my reservations to grow. The beauty and genius of the traditional book is that it is a thing unto itself. It is self-contained. Its limitations are its strength. It has covers, and between them is an entire world created by the interplay between the author’s imagination and the reader’s. Once you connect that autonomous world to the shifting, boundless, hyperactive universe of cyberspace, you run the very real risk of severing that magical bond of imagination. Give the reader a photographic vista of the Grand Canyon and he no longer has to imagine it. By opening up the book to the limitless possibilities of the digital age, Amazon just might be risking closing it for good. SA

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