Last week, Barnes & Noble unveiled its own e-book device, the nook, amidst a growing price war over e-books, e-devices, hardcovers, and books in general. It’s no secret that I enjoy e-books and the freedom e-publishing aspires to bring to consumers, but every single debate about digital publishing focuses on print versus e-book. When I read an article about Jane Friedman’s E-Publishing venture–with a focus on acquiring great African-American fiction, no doubt–my initial reaction was one of delight. Most proponents of digital publishing bemoan the hesitance of traditional print publishing in adopting the e-publishing model, of not understanding how different it is, and treating it as an anathema to literature. However, as I began to think about the realities of the mainstreaming of the e-book, it dawned on me that a little technology can be dangerous.

E-devices run upwards hundreds of dollars, and e-books are typically list price or higher (in the case of St Martin’s Press, e-book versions of print books can cost $14.00!!). The impetus behind Wal-Mart, Target and KMart’s power to make or break an author was the result of consumers stopping in one of those stores and buying new releases for 30-40% off their list prices. Each month’s Harlequin/Silhouette lines could be bundled in the weekly specials, or a new author could be tried for a relatively moderate price. Despite the shrinking mid-list, a book thrown in a rack at the supermarket or those discount stores were treated in an egalitarian method–if you have five or six dollars to spend on a book, you could do so with minimum fuss and minimum prices.

Sure, there remain millions of consumers who are willing to plunk down hundreds of dollars on an iPhone or a PlayStation 3 or a plasma-screen TV, but books are leisure items, items that are supposed to be an inexpensive form of entertainment. I worry about the rising costs of reading and the digital divide when I walk into my public library and see every public computer with internet, and see lines of people–older, middle-aged, teenaged, and younger–waiting their turn to access the world wide web for just an hour. On local community college campuses, professors have been urged by their department heads to use less paper and post their class materials online, yet many of their students don’t own a computer, and many have only the most basic computer skills. Children of this generation may be more technologically savvy than those who have come before them, but for today, for the now, is there a possibility that the e-divide could do more harm to encouraging literacy than not?

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