Last night we watched one of those mystery/detective yarns that PBS imports from Merrie England. Figuring as a "clew" was trace evidence of bookcloth on one of the victims' smacked heads. Bookcloth? Many of us, I'm sure, do recall the days of physical books with paper pages, and covers sort of wallpapered with a textile for durability. That textile is bookcloth; in the U.S. we usually refer to it as "buckram" but other sorts of cloth may be used. Fittingly, the whacker turned out to be a professor of advanced years, because the subliminal message of bookcloth is: How quaint!
It's another reminder of the ongoing process of shifting our reading habits from ecologically wasteful wood pulp to equally ecologically wasteful high-tech electronic gadgets.
Like many such processes, there are bound to be false starts and readjustments. (Recall Betamax, and cassette tapes.) I've been a convert to e-books and specifically to the Kindle for several years now, but these devices have drawbacks. The original Kindles, for example (including Gen 3 and the keyboardless touchables) lack color, and can't provide satisfactory viewing of charts, graphs, or illustrations that may be in the original book. More important, they're all proprietary: What you buy from Amazon has to stay in an Amazon device, ditto with the Nook and other imitators.
So I think the concept offered by ZolaBooks, described today in the Sunday Post, sounds like a winner. They are planning an on-line service that will enable books purchased there to be read on ANY device. This and other features suggest that Zola might be a "germinal" idea.
The downside may be that ZolaBooks envisions itself as yet another entry in the social media category. "Follow" your friends or favorite reviewers, track what they're reading, link to Facebook, see what's "hot," make recommendations yourself ... all that kind of stuff. I've never been much of a herd-reader. A lot of current bestsellers just don't interest me. And I tend to read books in a wide variety of subject matter and styles, so I have little interest in a site that tries to lead me to "other books I may like." We'll see how that works out.
The service is being rolled out gradually as certain contractual problems are being solved but readers can check it out: www.zolabooks.com .
Meanwhile, as of this morning there seems to be a little malfunction in the website. The site is "optimized" for Safari or Chrome browsers but using Internet Explorer, completing my basic account information proved impossible. I suppose that will be ironed out.
Comments