In E-Book Era, You Can’t Even Judge a Cover:
Such encounters are becoming increasingly difficult. With a growing number of people turning to Kindles and other electronic readers, and with the Apple iPad arriving on Saturday, it is not always possible to see what others are reading or to project your own literary tastes.
You can’t tell a book by its cover if it doesn’t have one.
“There’s something about having a beautiful book that looks intellectually weighty and yummy,” said Ms. Wiles, who recalled that when she was rereading “Anna Karenina” recently, she liked that people could see the cover on the subway. “You feel kind of proud to be reading it.” With a Kindle or Nook, she said, “people would never know.”
Among other changes heralded by the e-book era, digital editions are bumping book covers off the subway, the coffee table and the beach. That is a loss for publishers and authors, who enjoy some free advertising for their books in printed form: if you notice the jackets on the books people are reading on a plane or in the park, you might decide to check out “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” or “The Help,” too.
Also a big problem for the pompous set: how will I signal my intellectual superiority if I don’t have a library full of all the right
books?
The solution will come about both technologically and socially, just like it has for music. Instead of shelves of vinyl records, or a tower of CD’s, technology has adapted to replace this form of signaling: co-workers in my office always check out what music is on a new hire’s iTunes directory; new couples scan through each other’s iPod and iTunes directories; Kindles are swapped. People broadcast their playlist via Facebook or Last.fm.
Something similar will happen when books free themselves from their physical chains. I would expect in the near future the ability of Apple iBooks to broadcast which books you have bought to the social media of your choice (with your approval). Or as a workaround, I’m sure there is a facebook application as annoying as Farmville which you can show off your literary chops to your friends.
The success of all of this signaling will be judged not on the ease of use for the user, who is broadcasting their signal, but rather the audience: the signal cannot be an indiscriminate one-to-many (like the aforementioned Farmville) or people will ignore it. The creators of this signal should look at Last.fm or Flickr for design cues. There are already many virtual bookshelves on Facebook, but the user experience (by and large) is pushing users to buy more books. A soft-sell is needed. Additionally, I might not care what friends from high school are reading, but I care deeply about one specific person’s reading habits and then care somewhat about a group of three-to-seven’s reading habits.
