The way books are written, read, and created is changing, and eventually society will catch up with e-books ~ Junko Kamata, President of Voyager

It's been a while since the so-called "Year One of E-books," and with various devices and players now available and content libraries expanding, e-books have clearly entered a phase of establishment. Yet, many challenges remain, and untapped potential still seems to lie dormant. This time, we spoke with Junko Kamata of Voyager Inc., who, alongside Masaaki Hagino—known as "Mr. E-book"—helped pioneer Japan's e-book industry during its early days.
(Interviewer: Yuzo Ono, Director of Planning and Promotion, Digital Business Bureau, Dentsu Digital Inc.)

---

Aiming for the appeal that prevents e-books from being derided as "printed matter under glass"

──Please tell us about your first encounter with digital technology and the internet, and your impressions at the time.

Kamata: After graduating from university, I wanted to work in the video industry. I was fortunate to join LaserDisc Corporation, established by Pioneer in 1981. There, I met Hagiya, who would later become the founder of Voyager Japan. At that time, Hollywood movies and music videos were the bestsellers for laser discs. Soon after, laser karaoke emerged and became the mainstay of the laser disc business. I was assigned to a somewhat unconventional department handling works categorized as "other," distinct from these mainstream titles.

Back then, I really loved the half-baked digital nature of laser discs. By half-baked, I mean that because the technology was immature, you could explain it verbally. For example, when connecting a computer to a laser disc player for control, you first connect the cables and send a signal from the computer. The player receives this signal, then slowly searches for each disc's address one by one and ejects them one at a time. Only after the ejection is complete does the signal return to the computer, allowing the next signal to be sent. This sense of unrefined speed is incredibly important to people. Being able to verbally describe the process when creating something is vital.

──When you launched Japan's Voyager in partnership with the U.S. Voyager project, I understand you used Apple Computer's "HyperCard" software for development.

Kamata: HyperCard was central to multimedia at the time, and it fundamentally changed how we perceived programming. Since actions could be controlled with words, it was actually quite humanities-oriented. Using HyperCard allowed writers and editors to create freely without needing programmers.

Around that time, the U.S. Voyager was creating multimedia works using HyperCard, but selling the English versions directly in Japan had limitations. So, Voyager Japan released a toolkit to create "Expand Books"—electronic books—as a product tailored for the Japanese market. That was the prototype for our electronic book business. We released various Expand Books, but the best-selling one was Shinchosha's "100 Books from the Shincho Bunko Library." This digital compilation of 100 books sold 30,000 copies at 15,000 yen each. That shows a market of that scale already existed back then. While it was read on PC screens using CD-ROMs at the time, there was an unexpected positive reaction to the large, easy-to-read text.

──So you yourself initially had an interest in video, meaning you didn't enter e-books because you wanted to make books, but rather came to it from video and multimedia, right?

Kamata: I didn't create Voyager because I loved books. But when working with multimedia, the absence of text feels like a huge limitation. Text fills in what visuals alone can't convey. Some people might resort to gimmicks when visuals fall short, but the only way to avoid that is to use text.

──Looking back at the Expanded Books from that era, you hear a crisp "shari" sound when turning pages, or music plays on the inside cover. Recent e-books rarely have such exciting interactive elements, so it felt fresh. While the current e-book market is booming, it seems like existing publishers are just responding to the times, lacking the thrilling sense of wonder that multimedia used to have.

Kamata: That's right. Simply digitizing a book's pages as-is makes it hard for anything truly new to emerge from that. Major publishers treat e-books as "rights" and focus on generating profit from them. While the ability to read books on various devices is a huge step forward, current e-books are sometimes derisively called "print under glass." We aim for the kind of fun found in returning to the fundamentals—things only possible because it's an e-book, like making greater use of video and audio.

Society will eventually catch up to e-books, driven by a generation accustomed to search

──We often hear concerns that the advent of e-books will kill sales of physical books in bookstores.

Kamata: Book sales had been declining long before e-books appeared. Books that were once only available at bookstores became accessible anytime at station kiosks and convenience stores, causing high-turnover titles to stop selling well in bookstores. Then e-commerce arrived from overseas, and people naturally gravitated toward convenience, leading to fewer bookstores.

──Criticism also targets e-books themselves. For instance, it's often said that while physical books have a certain fetishism, that kind of attachment to paper doesn't arise with e-books. There's also the point that content from e-books is harder to remember, and I think there's some truth to that.

Kamata: I also love physical books. But ultimately, it's a matter of getting used to it; I think people will adapt to e-books with use. Plus, with e-books, you can search for specific passages that catch your interest, or get them instantly whenever you want. I believe the extent to which e-books gain market share will depend on how much that ease and convenience are valued. It's true that information might be harder to remember if it doesn't exist in a physical, paper form. However, once the younger generation, who are accustomed to searching, becomes the core of society, that might change. In education, I feel the ability to search will become increasingly important, and the fundamental skill will be combining the results of searches to explain things logically.

──Some also point out that digitization and online integration diminish human imagination. For instance, could adding video or music to e-books actually narrow the reader's imagination?

Kamata: I don't believe e-books, where text is accompanied by audio or video, inherently limit imagination. However, other media like games might have an impact. They encourage thinking focused on how to conform to rules set by creators, which could potentially stifle imagination.

──While e-books offer the advantage of publishing works previously unpublishable, there's also criticism that they lower the overall quality, much like "bad money drives out good."

Kamata: I don't think the medium itself causes a decline in quality, but it's true that anything can be published. Furthermore, the internet makes it easier to find such works. As society changes, there's a sense that education and fundamental aspects haven't kept pace, and I believe literacy in these areas is something we need to develop going forward.

──Masaki Hagino, founder of Japan's Voyager and often called "Mr. E-book," is a pioneer in the industry. He stated, "I've always viewed e-books as a down-to-earth medium for ordinary people, and a means to voice opinions even amidst hardship." It seems he strongly believes in capturing these small voices. What is Voyager's approach and philosophy in tackling e-books?

Kamata: For the future of e-books, I believe the essential keywords, using the Romanized letters of "eBooks" as initials, are: Eternity (perpetuality), Borderless (internationality), Open (openness), Originality (originality), Knowledge (knowledge/information), and Social (social). First, we must consider permanence. Also, since the original market is small, international reach is necessary to find readers. And above all, the most important thing is to create books packed with originality and knowledge/information.

There is a term called "disruptor" (creative destroyer). This term appears in "Innovation," an internal document by The New York Times Company discussing and analyzing future management strategies. It illustrates that while the first products emerging from innovation are often cheap and low-quality, they eventually reach an acceptable quality threshold. At that point, the critical factor becomes the customer base required to sustain that quality. Voyager has consistently focused on publishing and provided the necessary systems and tools to support such a small-scale operation.

In 2014, we launched Romancer ( https://romancer.voyager.co.jp ), an electronic publishing service. For professionals, converting DTP files to e-book formats is standard, but for individuals, that approach might be inconvenient. We developed Romancer based on the idea: Why not use Word, accessible to anyone, as the conversion master? From a Word manuscript to publishing as an e-book, it takes just five minutes. By embedding hyperlinks to online videos, audio, and images within the manuscript, we can simply solve the limitations of explaining things with text alone. If you push too hard to chase novelty, it becomes costly and unsustainable. Multimedia in the past was like that; if you get too far ahead—say, four steps ahead—you lose the audience that understands, and you can't attract enough customers. We must constantly strike that balance.

At the same time, I want to cherish the dreams and visions we hold for innovation. There's an intriguing sketch left behind by Graham Bell, who invented the telephone in 1876. He envisioned wrapping telephone wires around his body to take the phone outside, and this idea was captured in a sketch. Fast forward to 2015, and we have smartphones and smartwatches. Similarly, with the e-books we're developing, if we keep realizing even one thing at a time out of the hundred we believe in, I think it will eventually blossom.

A new cycle of creation emerges from the new framework of e-books

──There's talk that with e-books, covers and bindings will disappear or become less important.

Kamata: Book design remains crucial for e-books. While they lack the physical thickness and tactile feel of a book, deciding how to design the cover is still a major element. So, book designers won't disappear, but the framework they work within will change. Regarding covers, I think physical packaging will decrease going forward. However, we'll still need something to identify individual pieces of content as icons. The power to condense that essence still lies with the book designer. To intuitively convey what the book is, you need a cover; you need something to wrap it in.

──Content being the package itself has its pros and cons. Certainly, breaking things down offers convenience, like buying music track by track. But on the other hand, just as with books or music albums, there are concepts and ideas that can only be expressed through the cohesion of a whole. What do you think?

Kamata: For writers, frameworks are crucial. Every medium—newspapers, magazines, books—imposes constraints: character limits per line, page layouts, sentence length, punctuation. Writers compose while considering these.

For example, on Twitter, you feel compelled to write something aphoristic, right? That's because the Twitter framework inherently possesses that power. Gradually, writers become influenced by these frameworks. McLuhan famously said, "The medium is the message." That's exactly it. When there's an audience, the influence of the framework is immense. Moreover, people aren't accustomed to the absence of frameworks. I often say, "No deadline, no manuscript." When told they can do whatever they want freely, they become unsure of what to do. Without a framework, a manuscript simply won't get finished.

──Nowadays, you can read various texts online using a browser. What are the advantages of e-books compared to that?

Kamata: The key advantage of e-books is that they come packaged within a defined framework. Currently, DRM restrictions on copying and quoting within that package have caused some stagnation. However, as people accustomed to free content develop significant resistance to these restrictions, I believe the introduction of fair use—establishing reasonable boundaries for legitimate use—will expand due to educational and societal needs. I think DRM for e-books will evolve as a shared understanding among these users. DRM stands for "Digital Rights Management," but from the e-book perspective, it feels more like "Don't Read Me" (laughs). But that barrier will likely be broken through.

──So, while packaged frameworks remain important for e-books, their form will adapt to the flow of our digitizing society?

Kamata: In digital terms, there's the concept of modules. It's the idea that individually functioning modules gradually combine to form a system. For e-books too, I think the natural cycle isn't about breaking books down and micronizing them, but rather that packages emerge from things that already exist in a micronized state. You start small, and as the shape becomes visible, new things you want to do emerge based on that. You decide for yourself how far to go, try it out, and then the next shape becomes visible, leading to further refinement.

Using the Aozora Bunko model, we explore approaches only possible online

──How will physical books and e-books coexist going forward?

Kamata: Paper books won't disappear, but prices might rise. However, we're realizing that books don't sell just because they're cheap, and that's fine. Also, what you want to express is greatly influenced by the physical format, so when digitizing, you'll likely want to rewrite the manuscript. Allowing that is crucial. Content displayed on digital screens risks being dismissed as redundant if overly verbose, so writing styles will likely evolve toward greater conciseness. Consequently, using images for explanation becomes more effective. Future e-books will likely mainstream the use of video and audio, integrated with online services. However, the underlying programs and technology should be so straightforward and simple that users barely notice they exist.

──Do you have thoughts on the future impact the internet will have on people and society?

Kamata: The way books are made will inevitably undergo significant change. I also think we'll see a trend emerging where books are created from communities centered around readers.

When considering the future of books like this, Aozora Bunko serves as one model. Aozora Bunko focuses on digitizing and freely publishing online, through volunteer efforts by ordinary citizens, literary works from the Meiji to early Showa periods whose copyrights have expired. The reality is that, even without funding, people working together have amassed 13,000 volumes. While Aozora Bunko digitizes existing works rather than creating new ones, I want to experiment with building a platform that effectively facilitates book creation using this approach. Furthermore, when attempting to create an archive of an author's personal works, funding becomes a problem. To solve this, I feel we might have to rely solely on the love of fans.

──Do you think the relationship between readers and writers will change in the future due to e-books?

Kamata: I believe it will. For example, author Natsuki Ikezawa, who has published many e-books with Voyager, is proactively digitizing his own works as they go out of print. He wants to engage with readers about their thoughts on his books and is preparing a platform for that exchange. I think authors want initiatives that allow them to connect directly with readers.

──I see. So, the way books are written, read, created, distributed, and even the flow of money—all these elements are blending together while something significant is changing. However, the exact shape of that change remains unclear.

Kamata: We're still experimenting, but I believe there are production methods uniquely possible online. When you really think about what an editor's job is in this context, I think it's about showing readers, "This is where the audience for this book is." Readers can probably tell whether an author is consciously aware of that or just writing because a theme is trendy. Precisely because e-books operate on a smaller scale, I feel the editor's role in forming such communities is functioning effectively as a first step.