Is this the end of print?

In India, there will always be space for both print and e-books.

There was no agreement in the session on the future of the printed word on the second day of the Lahore Literature Festival.

The panellists came from diverse backgrounds. Two were from the UK, where the latest revolution is taking place with print being replaced by e-books. One panellist was from India, where much like Pakistan the printing business is growing.

Michael Dwyer, the moderator of the session, started off with a quote of a British satirist who has likened the threat posed to the printed word from e-books to the way the escalator had challenged stairs.

The panelists were Gavin Francis, a Scottish author, Maina Bhagat from India and, John Gapper, an editor of the Financial Times.

Dwyer also mentioned that one of the wonders of e-books was that they escaped censorship. The sales of the ebook After the Shaikhs soared when the book was banned in the Gulf.

Bhagat said that in India there had been a lot of investment in bookstores. “There is a bright future for books in India,” she said adding that the bottom one-third of the population who had no access to the digital world were the source of increasing demand for books. “[In India] there will always be a space for both.”

Gapper thought Pakistan and India were the wrong places to debate the issue. He said “In the long run print is dead. It may be a longer long run in some parts of the world, he believes, but books will be a thing of the past”. Dwyer then referred to the ‘empathy’ and ‘fondness’ for books. Will the fondness ebb, he asked. He admitted that he also had a fondness for the printed book. Writers, he said would “lose all authorial control” in the e-book. However, “that is something we will have to accept”, he added. Bhagat said that readers could not connect with a screen like they did with a book in their hands. “A book is a book,” she said.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 23^rd, 2014.