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Jakarta Post

Have books turned their last page?

As the country celebrates National Book Day today, the traditional publishing industry and readers have grappled not only with increasing paper costs and taxes but also the slowly but surely growing challenge of new technology

The Jakarta Post
Jakarta
Mon, May 17, 2010

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Have books turned their last page?

A

s the country celebrates National Book Day today, the traditional publishing industry and readers have grappled not only with increasing paper costs and taxes but also the slowly but surely growing challenge of new technology.

From e-books to audiobooks and the newly launched Apple iPad, all these have taken readers to a whole new different level of interaction with words, at the same time can pose a serious threat to the viability of traditional book publishers.

But the real question is: How ready is our society to embrace such non-traditional platforms for reading?

Meet Gomez, 21, a medical student, is also a freelance model, but only few know that he is now part of the growing iPad community in the city.

For the past two weeks, he has been using the touch-screen iPad not only for work but also for
reading Stephenie Meyer’s The Twilight Saga.

Flipping and reading the book on a very crisp and crystal clear 9.7-inch iPad’s display screen had been a new, engaging experience, he told The Jakarta Post recently.

 “It also has a bookmarking feature that allows readers to highlight a text and refer it later,” he said.
But would he stick to the device for casual reading?

“Yes,” he said. “But only when I read novels or comic books. When it comes down to reading textbooks, I still prefer the paper-based one, as I can scribble down notes on them.”

Another platform that offers readers an alternative to paper books is an audiobook, a recording that is primarily the spoken words based on commercially printed materials.

Matthias, 25, a student majoring in psychology, is now getting used to listening to audiobooks as part of his academic life, for his professor requires him to do so.

“I can multitask while listening to the spoken audio,” he said.  

“Nevertheless, books are still way more convenient than audiobooks because I can read a particular, lovely passage over and over again and maintain my reading progress at my own speed.”

If there is a commonality between Gomez and Matthias, they both agree that physical books still matter and will still dominate the way in which people in our society read the written word.   

“Not all Indonesians can afford expensive iPads or audiobooks,” Matthias added.

Indeed, the future of reading on the portable, luminous LED-backlit screen of an iPad or Kindle is still in unknown territory, as Apple and Amazon have not yet officially launched their products here.

But audiobooks, which have been around in the country since the past few years, seem to have failed to attract Indonesian readers and have not changed their reading habits.

Rilik Satrio, a sales and merchandising officer of Kinokuniya, a Japanese bookstore chain selling mostly foreign books in Jakarta, said that the sales of audiobooks in his company had declined in the past few years.

“Due to the extra taxes and fees imposed by the government, their prices have become so expensive,” he said, adding that his company had prioritized selling paper-based books, as Indonesian society would maintain the culture of reading books within the traditional boundaries for many years to come.

The spokeswoman of T3, a magazine focusing on gadgets, Airin, concurred, saying that there are pros and cons surrounding the debate of whether or not books would somehow become extinct.

“But one thing is for sure, Indonesia has a growing market segment in digital reading,” she said.   

How does the Indonesian publishing world respond to and anticipate the idea of readers making the transition to reading books on non-paper platforms?

According to Husni Kamil, the general manager of Lentera Hati, a growing local publishing house company focusing on printing books with Islamic themes, the growth opportunities in the book market in Indonesia are good.

“We see e-books and technology as complementary to paper books, not as a total replacement,” he explained.

He said with the burgeoning emergence of bookstores, now reaching 1,300 outlets selling physical book, and with the state budget now allocating 20 percent of its total funds annually to education, the publishing industry in the country would become a hotbed for business.  

The Association of Indonesian Publishers (Ikapi) also has a similar opinion to that of Lentera Hati.
“We are not worried about the future of books. They won’t be easily replaced with technological devices because the purchasing power of most Indonesians to buy such things is still low,” the Ikapi Jakarta chairman Afrizal Sinaro told the Post. (tsy)

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