Perspectives

Tamaki Saito (Mainichi)

The age of electronic books is finally reaching Japanese shores. Bestselling author Natsuhiko Kyogoku's newest novel "Shineba iinoni" (Why not just die) was released almost simultaneously in May in print and electronic formats. In June, a group of writers including novelist Hideaki Sena launched "AiR," an electronic magazine that bypasses publishers and bookstores and is distributed for a fee.

Electronic reading devices have also been undergoing rapid development. A while ago, online commerce giant Amazon created quite a buzz with its Kindle. Since iPads went on sale in the U.S. in April, Apple Inc. has sold over 2 million of its new tablet computer, predicted to become consumers' favorite e-reader.

In the U.S., e-books brought in $313 million in sales in fiscal 2009, 2.8 times the figure from the previous year. In Japan, the Electronic Book Publishers Association of Japan (EBPAJ) announced that it will begin selling iPad versions of 10,000 e-books from its member companies.

Firstly, as a consumer, I welcome these developments.

Book junkies all have the same problem. That is, what to do with the many books taking up precious space in their homes. Space-saving e-books are the ultimate solution to this problem.

As the widespread use of electronic dictionaries attests, e-books have a major edge over print books when treated primarily as sources of information. It has been a long time since encyclopedias made the shift from print to CD-ROMS and DVDs. But Microsoft Corp.'s "Encarta," which was one of the earliest digital encyclopedias in that shift, was soon pushed out of the market by the online site, Wikipedia.

Needless to say, if we are to place priority on searchability and the volume and newness of information, analog publications do not stand a chance against their digital rivals. This makes digitalization most welcome in the field of education. It is obvious that making textbooks available in digital and online formats would significantly reduce the costs of compulsory education. The "Haraguchi Vision" unveiled by Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Kazuhiro Haraguchi in December 2009 included a plan to distribute digital textbooks to all elementary and junior high school students by the year 2015.

As a medical student, I struggled with the high cost of textbooks and reference books, and believe that if the digitalization of books were to reach university education, at least some of the disparities that exist between educational haves and have-nots may be alleviated. If low-cost tablet computers suitable for children were to become widely available, it would become easier to support education in developing countries.

For newspapers suffering from lagging sales and a magazine industry that has seen many titles fold, the trend of digitalization is nothing but a nightmare. I, too, feel a sense of crisis toward a reality in which high-quality articles resulting from painstaking reporting and multiple rewrites and checks are being driven out by online writing of uneven quality and credibility. Ultimately, everything will probably become available on the Web for a fee, but it's hard to say what will happen after that.

Does this mean that print books will completely disappear? I don't believe they will. There is a difference between books as text data and books as a physical substance, and a demand for the latter will undoubtedly remain.

What do print books have that e-books do not? Spines.

We often hear that one can tell the kind of person someone else is by looking at their bookcase. Bookcases lined with books are a type of self-expression, and can even be a significant factor in home decorating. The reason I get really involved in the cover design of the books I write is because I cannot let go of my fascination with books as physical objects. I suspect that the reason a sense of satisfaction and possession are lacking from my experiences with e-books is the absence of physicality.

Another joy of physical books is the ability to "experience life" with them. Until a certain point in my life, I had the habit of spending days re-reading books. Everywhere I went, I would take paperback books that had become molded to fit my hands, reading and re-reading them during breaks and meals. Memories of books that I read during those years are deeply intertwined with various scenes from my life at the time.

Human memories can be categorized into semantic memory -- that of meanings and information -- and episodic memory, which is that of personal events in one's life. Experiencing life with books creates episodic memories of our close relationships with books. I believe that the hallmark of an educated person in times past was probably the abundance of knowledge in the form of episodic memories.

As such, I hope that picture books, for example, continue to exist in paper form. The first book one encounters in life should be something with which we can develop a relationship through touch, at times even soiling and ripping them. Books are objects with large surface areas. And it is this ample tangibility that brings children and books close together.

I will continue to choose e-books as a source of information. But when it comes to important books that help make me who I am, I want to have them in my possession in print form, and have their spines in view as I go about my life.

We are not facing an either-or decision. The most likely future of publications is the diversity lent by the co-existence of digital, print, and online media. (By Tamaki Saito, psychiatrist)