The London Book Fair 2004 had the future of electronic publishing as the
theme of several seminars. Chas Jones reports on what the guest speakers had to
say.
What’s wrong with the e-book?
There was an early rush to publish digital books. Sales were dismal and the
flow of digital content soon dried up. Or so the story goes.
In fact the flow of digital material has continued. The focus for the
moment has shifted from fiction towards searchable text. If you are a business
user, you can scan the web for the company or personality you want to check out.
This makes it a profitable way to supply timely data.
A scientist cannot afford the time or the subscriptions to go through all the
printed journals in pursuit of answers. The medical world needs very accurate
information to help diagnose and prescribe. Digital data brings incalculable
productivity and provenance benefits to the academic community.
Content link from Random House has its online ebookstore and Houghton Mifflin
set the pace with its move to ereference books. Authors such as Dan Poynter
(http://www.parapublishing.com)
are using e-books to promote print editions. Electronic samples and trailers are
used to sell e-books and printed editions. The digital and print versions work
in parallel.
It is not all good news. There are some problems. There are 3 e-book
reader formats provided by Palm, Adobe and Microsoft, but this is not another
epic market struggle to match the VHS/Betamax or optical disk debacles. These
formats seem to coexist as they involve the publisher in only a small overhead
because there are no warehouses or production lines to build and stock.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is another perceived problem with the digital
format. Nobody would photocopy a whole book but the joy of digital media is the
way it can be copied and transmitted. All the e-book readers allow the
publisher to restrict copying and printing, although if the geeks turned their
attention to the problem they would quickly break the codes. The low cost
model being adopted by the e-book business might provide better protection from
piracy than encryption.
The successful e-book will not replace the printed book but will be another
way of delivering information. The music industry managed to persuade us to
purchase the same material in a variety of short-lived formats. The question is:
will the book-publishing industry make recycling such a profitable business?
Perhaps the real problem with the e-book is that we’re saddled with a
publishing industry with unsustainable overheads and a shrinking catalogue
which is printed on dead trees, moved round the world, stored and delivered
before half is pulped. Without support and investment, the e-book will do no
more than continue its slow growth.
© 2004 Charles Jones
