The bright hopes of digital publishing are gathered in London for the latest FutureBook conference and the future looks, well, familiar. As the new boss of HarperCollins, Charlie Redmayne, gave his keynote speech, previewed on this site, one bright spark petulantly tweeted: "This headline is 'news'? Charlie Redmayne: 'publishers must embrace change' #fbook2013 thebookseller.com/news/redmayne-…
Redmayne regretted that publishers, "historically … the most innovative and creative of organisations", had lost the plot. "I think that when it came to the digital revolution we came to a point where we stopped innovating and creating. We thought, we've done an ebook and that is what it is."
Much the same thought occurred to me at the weekend when a book failed to arrive, forcing me to buy the Kindle edition to mug up for a public event. The book in question was a memoir by the veteran film critic Barry Norman recalling the "53 years 3 months 2 weeks and a day" he spent with his redoubtable wife Diana, before her death two years ago.
Not much scope there for digital wizardry, but I would at least have expected some thought to have been put into how the text would flow on a tablet.
Perhaps a horror of "widows" (single words at the top of a page) is a bit of a niche hang-up – it's common among old-fashioned print journalists – but, whichever way I tried to read it, a distressing number of them popped up. Having missed the index, I didn't even realise there were any pictures until the end of the book, where I discovered a puddle of them.
I've never been a fan of the print tradition of clumping glossy pictures in standalone sections, but I can see the technical reason for it, since they call for a different quality of paper. Ebooks offer a chance to reintegrate text and image that wasn't taken here. This isn't just a question of improving a book, but of preventing it from getting worse. At one point, Norman wonders if his account of family life might be disintegrating into "one of those awful round-robin letters people send their friends at Christmastime" – and the disaggregation of text and pictures does indeed have that effect. At the point when you want to find out what people look like, you don't have a chance. Then you're treated to a lifetime of happy family snaps.
I paid £9.49 for the download, which is only 50p less than Amazon's hardback price (though admittedly a lot less than the £18.99 list price), so it feels wrong to be treated as a second-class reader.
