Electronic time moves faster than real time. Just three years ago, the book world was having a collective nervous breakdown about "the future of the book". But now those fears are fading. Christmas 2011 was the all-time ebook holiday. Amazon reports worldwide sales of more than a million Kindles a week, with record demand led by its Kindle Fire tablet.
The immediate future of the book is clear. E (electronic) is for easy; P (print) is for posterity. Book readers today are leading double lives. We are faithful to our libraries at home, but stray towards the delights of digital the moment we board a plane, train or automobile.
The pleasures of E means downloading the new book we fancy, from reviews, word-of-mouth or plain curiosity. The satisfactions of P come from acquiring lovely print editions for our bookshelves. In due course, but not quite yet, the world's writers and their agents will work out how fully to monetise this double market.
One unintended consequence of this irreversible trend has been to give the hardback a new lease of life. If the ebook is all about ease, and short attention spans, the ink and paper book must satisfy not just the thrill of reading, but the deep aesthetic pleasure associated with owning, holding and even scenting a favourite text. Already, there are signs that some publishers have cottoned on to this.
Not since the palmy days of late-Victorian publishing has so much care and attention been lavished on the hardback. Go into any bookshop now and you will find piles of brand-new hardbacks sporting coloured endpapers, scarlet silk bookmarks, heavy, deckle-edged paper and elaborate laminated boards. If Stevenson, Kipling or Conan Doyle were to wander into Waterstone's today, they would feel quite at home. Selling to high-end readers, admittedly a smaller market, allows the publisher to charge £35, even £40, for the new edition destined for the library shelf.
Forget Kipling et al. Recently, Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 and Stephen King's 11.22.63 have both appeared in the marketplace dressed up for the big occasion in jackets designed to appeal to the bibliophile. This is a trend of many dimensions. Jon McGregor's new stories (Bloomsbury) come in an edition aimed at collectors. Further down the literary brow, mass market writers, such as Malcolm Gladwell, have begun to experiment with hardback editions of their own humongous paperback bestsellers, for instance, The Tipping Point and Blink.
From the outside, the book trade looks staid, static and conservative, but inside the publishing jungle there's a life-and-death struggle between E and P. This competition has begun to sponsor a literary bonanza. If ever there was a golden age of reading, this is it.
The e-publisher's riposte to beautiful books has time and technology on its side. This is also the age of the book app. 2011 was a milestone year in lots of ways (Arab spring, death of Bin Laden, English cricket revival), but never more so than with Faber's launch of TS Eliot's The Waste Land as a book app.
Even the most devout print-conscious bibliophile could hardly fail to be impressed by the possibilities of reading, and listening to, this great poem in many different formats, including two recordings by the poet himself. Agreed: this treatment works especially well with a long poem, but Jamie Oliver also understands, and is profiting from, the market for the book app.
Currently, the big restraint on the book app (also known as the enhanced ebook) has been the technology. All this is changing. Driven by fierce competition between Amazon, Apple and their rivals, ebooks are acquiring audio and video facilities. Kindle Fire, Kobo and Nook e-readers, combined with the surging iPad market, are opening up new possibilities for the ebook publisher.
In every Darwinian struggle there must be a loser, an injured beast that slinks away into the undergrowth to die, alone and forgotten. Amid the celebrations for the brave new world of E, we should not forget that other kind of P, the trashy, mass market paperback. That's where the future's murky, and where the corporate publishers are really worrying.
Farewell to Skvorecky, a master of humour
First Havel, now Josef Skvorecky, who died in Toronto last week at the age of 87. The author of The Bass Saxophone and his masterpiece, The Engineer of Human Souls, among many sad, wise and irresistibly funny novels, was a truly great Czech. After his escape from Prague, he and his wife, Zdena, founded and ran their own imprint, Sixty-Eight Publishers, which became an international centre for Czech language and literature, publishing Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel, among many others. On his visits to England, one of the most delightful writers imaginable seemed to become almost English in his ironic melancholy and quirky stoicism. Skvorecky was wry, humane and always mischievously alert to the human comedy. It's been a hard month for world literature.
The Currant Bun laps up a new Forsyth saga
In the category of high-end hardback hits, with no whiff of the ebook about them, Mark Forsyth's compendium The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (Icon), spun off from Forsyth's blog, the Inky Fool, is one of the more exotic specimens. Not since Eats, Shoots & Leaves has a book about language (first noticed in this column last November) attracted so much attention in the bookshops, running through successive reprints. Forsyth threatens more. He says: "If a book about Indo-Proto-European and John Milton can get half a page in the Sun, it's only a matter of time before I can make Swinburne cool."
