Condensed reading

The new bookshelves I invested in just a few months ago have already been stuffed well beyond their capacity. The chairs and desks in my room creak anew under the collective weight of Steve Waugh's mammoth autobiography and too many other tomes to list here (most of them in hardback).

Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat threatens to flatten my bed, and now I'm worrying about what things will be like in 2010. Or even 2006. In the past year books have been acquired at the rate of 20 a month. Average that out over the next four years: where will I find the space in my room (or in my house) to accommodate over a thousand more?

At times like this my inner purist (the one who insists that books must stay in the form they are so I can delicately leaf through them, savour the touch of each individual page, smell the binder's glue etc etc) goes for a long walk. I ask myself: Could there be something to all this talk of digital books after all?

Digital books. You know, the little PDAs that will enable you to access the complete text of any book you want on an electronic device a little larger than a cellphone. Or the ones that can be downloaded from publishers' websites (HarperCollins has started digitising a backlist of over 20,000 titles, and other publishers are clambering out of their caves and getting Internet-friendly too).

In 2010, will special book kiosks "" like ATM machines "" dispense entire texts at the push of a few buttons? Will it be possible for people with the money and the technology to whip out a PDA and home in on a specific page of the most obscure title?

I have no idea. In India a lot will depend on the strides that have been made in Internet availability, and also on how people are accessing the Internet (through computers or cellphones). But we're moving in that direction alright.

Books as we know them now will certainly not have gone out of fashion (that will probably not happen even by 2050) but there will be rapid developments in specific spheres "" especially in non-fiction, where a dynamic medium like the Internet is hard to compete with. (In just a few years, the Net has considerably eroded the value of lumbering conventional encyclopaedias like the Britannica. Knowledge dissemination has already seen enormous change.)

The space offered by DVD-ROMs will make a big difference too "" reading for long hours while sitting at a computer is something most people will have to adjust to. One of my prize acquisitions in the past year has been an eight-DVD set containing the complete text of 4,100 issues of the New Yorker magazine. You can't beat that for convenience.

P.S. Unlikely though it is that we'll all be doing our reading on our cellphones in 2010, even unlikelier is that the Nobel Prize will have been awarded to a graphic novelist. Now that's something high on my personal wishlist.