Man Booker prize judge Chris Mullin has turned down the use of a Kindle – but former Orange prize judge Daisy Goodwin thinks he's a bit of a luddite ...
Chris Mullin, the former MP and writer, and one of the judges of this year's Man Booker prize, has refused to use a Kindle to read the submissions. Daisy Goodwin, the television producer and writer, who loves her e-reader, thinks he's wrong. Is this next chapter in book publishing a good thing? Emine Saner got the conversation started by asking the black-and-white TV-owning Mullin if he was simply a technophobe . . .
Chris Mullin I don't want to disappoint you, but I don't have a fundamental objection to new technology. I was offered the opportunity, as all judges of the Man Booker prize were, and I declined it on the grounds that I like to feel a book, see the look of it.
Daisy Goodwin I'm interested that you didn't leap at the idea of having a Kindle for the Booker. I chaired the Orange prize last year and would have given my eye teeth to have had one, because I spent months where everywhere I went I was carrying two or three hardbacks. I'd be interested to see if it changes the judging process, because you inevitably make judgments about the book from its cover, the author photograph, all that kind of stuff. You don't get any of that on a Kindle, so it may be that you end up judging the book purely on the words it contains. I think you're being unnecessarily luddite if you have to read 130 novels for the Booker.
CM I don't find a problem with it. I travel up and down the country on the train, and I have two or three books in my case. I'll ask the other judges soon [if they are using theirs] and I expect they will tell me what an idiot I am . . .
DG I do share your reservations about whether the reading experience is the same. I don't read continuously in the way I read with a book. When you have a book you have a real tactile sense of how far you're getting. With a Kindle, there's just an indication of how far you've got, which doesn't feel the same. It feels much easier to pick up and put down. The novels I've read on [my Kindle] are probably not the novels I was absolutely concentrating on.
CM That reinforces my view that if it's the kind of book you want to enjoy, it's preferable to read the actual book.
DG I agree, but there are advantages with an e-reader. It's good for reference, and having random things. I downloaded all of Shakespeare's plays so, at a loose end, I will start reading some Shakespeare on the tube, which I wouldn't have done before because that would have required forethought.
CM The manager of a famous bookshop told me he thought the only bookshops that would exist in a few years would be in central London and one or two specialist independent stores around the country. You only have to look to America, where this trend is further advanced, and huge bookstores are going out of business. The book trade is going to consolidate in fewer and fewer hands. It might turn some of our town centres into intellectual deserts.
DG Big bookshop chains may go out of business, but I think it will be good news for boutique independent booksellers, because they will find themselves without competition. The other thing is, because the cost of entry is far lower, I know of two or three people who have set up e-publishers with very little capital, so there may be more choice.
Emine Saner It will open up publishing. Anyone will be able to write a novel and publish it. Is that a good thing?
DG In the same way you can be discovered through YouTube, maybe the gatekeepers will change – they will no longer be agents and publishers. But I like having my choice curated a bit. I think it would be a great shame if there were no more editors.
CM I hope it's not the end of editing.
DG One of the problems is going to be, how do you market them? When you buy online, you tend to go for books you've heard of; you don't have that serendipitous thing you have when you go to a bookshop and buy something you weren't expecting to. It will put more power in the hands of people who review books on Amazon and get involved on online forums. I wonder if, in the same way people download singles rather than albums, people will start downloading chapters rather than whole books. Maybe writers will have to work harder on first chapters, as people will buy because they were given the first chapter to read for free. It's interesting because that returns to the Victorian model of publishing novels, where you publish in episodes, with cliffhangers.
ES What about the little impacts on our society? I like seeing what people are reading on the bus, or going into their houses and looking at their bookshelves. You don't get that with ebooks.
CM We readers of books will hold out for some time yet, so there will be people reading books in public. I know you can't stop the march of technology, but I worry about the impact on the book business and all it entails – the jobs lost in the supply chain, for instance. What about the impact of piracy?
DG I think the people who read books are older, and possibly more law-abiding. On e-readers they have introduced a thing where you can lend a book to someone, which is no different from me lending you my copy of a book. I think it's a good thing that it might make more books available to more people, especially as, tragically, our library service is being cut. Although the entry level to a Kindle is high, the price will inevitably come down, but kids can get all the classics instantly for free. Also, books will never go out of print now.
CM If cyber war is a future threat, we could all wake up one morning and we could have been cut off; all the books could have been deleted.
DG There was that famous example in America. There was a copyright problem with a collection of George Orwell, and Amazon deleted it from all the people who had downloaded it. Big corporations have the ability to erase a text as if it has never existed.
CM That may be something to worry about. For now I worry about the effect on bookshops. I love books. I like sitting in my study, seeing the books that have been formative influences on my life all around me. I don't think either of us are fundamentalists about this.
DG Exactly. I'm not denying that you get more pleasure from reading a physical book; I love to keep books – I have a battered copy of Proust that I took around South America when I was 19. You realise what you're giving up [with ebooks] and I would say the only gain is convenience.