Digital dilemma

My obsession with e-books began when our decently large book shelves at home began overflowing with paperbacks and hard covers accumulated over years of not very glorious academic pursuits and the struggles en route couple with a passion to buy and read different genre of books and periodicals. On a recent business trip to the US, I bought myself  the inevitable - The Amazon Kindle, at a black Friday door buster  Target sale at Waterbury,CT at 5AM braving unusually unapologetic crowds wanting to lay hands on anything that was on sale. This was a paradigm shift in the way Ranjini and I read our books or rather stored them and the thought of not having to sell prized paperbacks to the recycler by weight was only too comforting.  During my growing years, I have borrowed books from the lending library, photocopied sections for reference, pooled money with friends and my brother to buy a comic or a novel. Piracy and copyrights were unknown then. We are now, again and almost back to those days with the Kindle and other book readers offering digital copies of literally every book for a trivial amount or sometimes even free. Do the publishers and authors care about protecting the digital rights or, are they just contented that more readers are reading their books now. Amazon has never bothered (at least, so far) to stop a registered Kindle user from passing their account credentials and have multiple copies delivered to any number of devices. Digital rights management experts disagree that this is a miss from the copyright owners despite knowing that there are thousands of pirated copies firmly residing on Kindles around the world. At least to me it seems that both the print brand and the online brand are thriving-at least on Amazon. The entire business of books is undergoing a transformation where some forms of books are better served digitally say maps, newspapers and magazines. Talking of maps, I never got a chance to drive in a new country or city having your co-passenger reading out instructions from a paper map. By the time, i got a chance to drive on the American interstates or the British motorways, the GPS and the SatNav systems had come in making it even easier to navigate. Of course the added benefit being the ability to find the nearest restaurant or a fuel outlet when you needed them most and the even fancier 'alternate routes' . Recently when i was given a complimentary copy of the AAA British road map by the car rental agency from where I hired a car to drive through the Welsh countryside, I could hardly differentiate it from a school atlas!

So not only the change in format helps in this case, but also the form. Meanwhile more and more publishing houses are going digital silently with a belief and faith that buyers of the print version will continue to buy while those who could not afford to get a copy might still get a chance to read them. And sooner the publishing fraternity understands that only people who pay generally would pay anyways. The key to the survival of wonderful stores like Borders and B&N could well be here...

Maybe, the printed book can survive too.