“Collectable” ebooks?

A recent blog posting about “signed” ebooks set me thinking about the prospects for ebook collecting. These are, surely, close to zero. By definition, an ebook is intangible. The tangible object is the ebook reader. You can read an ebook – but you can’t pick it up.

Moreover, developing technology is likely to render today’s ebooks inaccessible within a few years. Do you, for example, have equipment that will read an 8-inch floppy disk in CPT format (at one time a high-end word-processing technology)? If someone does have such equipment, they’ll probably charge you handsomely for transferring data to media you can still access.

In future, a few enthusiasts may collect obsolete ebook readers – though it will be ever more difficult to maintain them. But frankly, a digital inscription seems to me about as emotive as a rubber stamp. There seems no scope at all for a collectors’ market in ebook association copies.

That may help to explain why pundits forecast a collapse of the paperback market, but a continuing demand for small high-quality printed editions. As I’ve pointed out before, those high-quality editions may have to be far more expensive than today’s hardbacks. That’s because they’ll have to carry the entire print-origination cost, without any prospect of typesetting being re-used in paperback editions and reprints.

But at least – if high-quality editions do survive – there’ll be still something you can ask an author to inscribe for you. Authors’ lives would be that much more drab and isolated if such requests were never made.