There is a moment in The Confessions when Saint Augustine is astonished to find another scholar, Saint Ambrose, reading silently to himself. This quiet encounter 16 centuries ago might be seen as one of the earliest signs of a reading revolution of its time, coming as it did at a time when the great libraries must have been hubbubs of competing voices. It is worth recalling it from our own period of unprecedented change.
We are now three years into the decade of the ebook. While publishers have been slow to capitalise on the creative potential of this new technology, readers have seized upon it, with increasing numbers using it to bypass traditional routes into print and transform themselves into writers. The scale of the revolution is dizzying: according to figures revealed at the Frankfurt book fair in October, 391,000 books were self-published in the US in 2012 – a 59% rise on the previous year. This figure, which combines ebooks and hard-copy titles, compares with 301,642 printed books produced by traditional publishers. The picture becomes no less startling when you shift focus from the macro to the micro scale: in November Beth Reekles, an 18-year-old Welsh physics student, was named by Time magazine as one of the 16 most influential teenagers in the world on the strength of a 19 million following for her self-published high school romances.
It is easy to decry such stories as flashes in an increasingly tawdry pan, and it is true that the vast majority of self-published titles will sink without trace into a great sludge of erotica and elves. However, publishers are wising up to the fact that writers such as Ms Reekles can deliver new readers in huge numbers. She has joined a swelling procession of self-published authors who are making their way into conventional publishing deals.
The picture becomes more complicated when one considers the impact this reading revolution has had on literature itself. In every period of intense technological change there is a stage at which capacity outstrips imagination. This publishing moment is no exception. Ebooks are still largely limited to electronic versions of the traditional codex.
However, here again readers are making the running, embracing the collaborative potential of electronic texts to leave their marks on the books they read. One might not be able to share an ebook in the way that one can share a library book, but it's possible to highlight and annotate them for all to see. In this manner the electronic text becomes analogous to a cacophonous communal reading room – not unlike the great library of Alexandria before Saint Ambrose introduced Saint Augustine to the once bizarre concept of reading as a silent, solitary occupation. We may hate the thought of it, but we cannot ignore it.
