When I first read a
report that said paperback sales were down by 25% year to
year, but hardback sales were holding its own, I was surprised. I
thought, it would be the other way round because e-books do cost
substantially less than first editions, but not the cheaper paperbacks.
Then I read another story, Ebooks are rekindling women's x
rated reading, it all began to make sense. The Kindle
is the perfect device for consuming pornographic media, especially
'mommy porn'!I am surprised I didn’t see it earlier, although I did have a nagging feeling of a piece missing from the logic puzzle, somewhere. How could I not have seen it? Porn has always driven technology. Let’s go back to the VCD and VHS craze from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. The explosion in the sales of these devices was mind-blowing. Was there really that much media to consume, even taking into account the addictive Hong Kong soaps. One day (I was living in Puchong at the time) a neighbour invited my wife and me for drinks because we were new there. Maybe, there was little to talk about after the niceties were over; maybe, it was because the men and the women were having different conversations; maybe he thought, since I am a man, I was constantly horny, he decided to show me his collection of video tapes. He had about thirty of them and every one was porn, with nothing left to the imagination in the cover art. Being neighbourly and all, he offered to let me borrow them. I declined, saying that I didn’t have a VHS player, a declaration that had him gaping at me in disbelief. He offered to let us watch it on his player in his house, to which I said, “Yes ... maybe ... one day,” but never brought that subject up again.
Bad press
Porn has always had a bad press, but if one dares to look at it objectively, it has been the game changer, the killer app, in more industries then we care to admit. Almost overnight, the VCD/VHS phenomena facilitated the consumption of porn in the privacy of living rooms (and bedrooms). I’m not going to be judgemental about this, but some disturbing stories did emerge: a close friend, who used to send her son to a baby-sitter in our neighbourhood, was shocked to find him watching porn with the family in the living room of their house when she went to pick him up early one day, unannounced. (We used to wonder where he learnt some of his more colourful vocabulary -- he was in kindergarten -- though we tried not to make too much of it.)
Next, came the DVD revolution; porn in high definition -- don’t even try to visualise it, or you will be struck down by a thunderbolt. One only had to ask the sales staff of the electrical appliance stores which brand and which model was good for pirated media and, in particular, porn. (There was one major international brand – no names mentioned here – that insisted on being ‘kosher’, but found its market share dropping so fast that it quickly released a jail-broken model for the local and regional markets.)
The next major game changer was the internet browser, Netscape. “Wah! Fantastic man; just type ‘xxx’ and you can watch all the porn you want,” drooled a colleague. I dare say I was one of the early adopters of the computer – from the IBM 1130 in the university, to the LSI desktop at work and the Apple 11e at home. But I was so far behind the loop on this one: the entire office was talking about porn on the net, and I was still fiddling about with spread sheets.
Mommy porn
Then, Amazon.com became a favourite place to buy porn magazines -- Playboy, Hustler, you name it -- and have it delivered to your home discretely wrapped in brown paper, eliminating the risk of being spotted procuring them from magazine stands at railway stations like a perv. Next stop: Android, of which Steve Jobs famously said, “Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone.” Guess what? They did. But with Apple keeping porn off the iPhone, it's a win-win situation : buy your kids iPhones and iPads for Christmas, and get yourself an Android for private use.
And now, it’s Kindle time! When Silverfish first opened shop, a major distributor, who deals primarily in best-sellers, brought us a box of then popular romance novels to choose from, but we declined for fear of being hammered by our customers because there were too many visuals of bursting bustiers on the covers. Now, if you are a Jackie-O look-alike, sitting at the lobby of a five-star hotel, in your leopard-skin pillbox hat, reading from a Kindle while waiting for your appointment, and he walks in in his business suit, what’s going to be his first comment? About what you are reading, or about your Kindle? Would he care if you are reading Dostoevsky or mommy porn? Okay, fast forward three years later: still same coffee shop, still same hat, the novelty has worn off, and you are reading the latest collection of essays by Milan Kundera. Would prefer to read that in public on a Kindle, or a ‘book’ book? One thinks, you would rather be caught holding the latter, a hardback if possible for, now (as before), it’s about bragging rights. Second, you don't want anyone to assume you are reading ‘mommy porn’.
Evolution
Men would be in the same boat too, of course, but one suspects our nether regions are more readily titillated by visual imagery than by prose. That would probably explain why, while the earlier tech revolutions were led by men, this one, with the e-book, will be dictated by women.
Blame it on evolution.
