Last updated: Jun 24, 2008
The Elevator Pitch for the Future of eBooks
1. The question that haunts most traditional book publishers is whether the future augers for them the end of paper-based publishing models, and a complete embrace of electronic publishing. Are eBooks truly a harbinger of what is to come?
2. eBooks strike many observers as an anomaly: print media running into the hundreds of pages would at appear to be the least likely candidate for a transition to online publishing. But some form of transition has finally begun. Whether it has "legs" remains an open question. Some of the statistics I'll reference in this section point to a burgeoning interest in the format; others point more to a blip on the radar.
3. A host of vendors, hardware, software, digital rights management (DRM) and publishers themselves are showing an ever-increasing determination to make a go of the format. But the sales numbers are still modest, particularly as a percentage of paper sales of the same material.
4. The growth in adoption of mobile hardware, most obviously Apple's iPods, is a harbinger of change. Although not an eBook device, with over 100 million iPods sold, and then combined with iPhones, the iPod Touch, Blackberries (is that the plural?) and a host of other mobile hardware, there's a clear increased willingness of consumers to deal with mobile media. Are books really included here?
5. I'm a naysayer. Mobile phones and email/text devices make a ton of sense. Mobile Web surfing makes a modicum of sense. Each of these uses stands up to scrutiny in mobile setting.
Watching television on a device smaller than your shoe makes little sense. Reading a book on a dedicated device, when books already offer an ideal form factor, makes next to no sense. The idea that you can carry around several hundred books on said device I think appeals to a very modest segment of book buyers and readers.
2. eBooks strike many observers as an anomaly: print media running into the hundreds of pages would at appear to be the least likely candidate for a transition to online publishing. But some form of transition has finally begun. Whether it has "legs" remains an open question. Some of the statistics I'll reference in this section point to a burgeoning interest in the format; others point more to a blip on the radar.
3. A host of vendors, hardware, software, digital rights management (DRM) and publishers themselves are showing an ever-increasing determination to make a go of the format. But the sales numbers are still modest, particularly as a percentage of paper sales of the same material.
4. The growth in adoption of mobile hardware, most obviously Apple's iPods, is a harbinger of change. Although not an eBook device, with over 100 million iPods sold, and then combined with iPhones, the iPod Touch, Blackberries (is that the plural?) and a host of other mobile hardware, there's a clear increased willingness of consumers to deal with mobile media. Are books really included here?
5. I'm a naysayer. Mobile phones and email/text devices make a ton of sense. Mobile Web surfing makes a modicum of sense. Each of these uses stands up to scrutiny in mobile setting.
Watching television on a device smaller than your shoe makes little sense. Reading a book on a dedicated device, when books already offer an ideal form factor, makes next to no sense. The idea that you can carry around several hundred books on said device I think appeals to a very modest segment of book buyers and readers.
Page Index
The Background of eBooks
eBooks have had a checkered history, to say the least. In the midst of the dotcom implosion, they were tarred with the same brush of brashness and ultimate failure. Unquestionably round one went to paper.But eBooks are back, and there are lessons here for everyone in the publishing community.
In the late 1980s, Ted Nelson, often acknowledged as the true father of hypermedia, told (the now defunct) Seybold Seminars audience: "Here we are using some of the finest technology of the 20th century to recreate the experience of reading on paper."
That comment struck deep. I've been watching the ever-increasing quality of computer displays as they improve both in resolution and contrast, and some years ago I wondered: "Why are we going to all this engineering expense and trouble just to duplicate something that works perfectly well: paper?"
This idea originated with Ted Nelson. As I recall Ted harangued the audience that day saying: Surely there was something more profound we could do with all of this technology and effort.
In his case, "something more" led to an exploration of his particularly fascinating vision of hypermedia, Project Xanadu (http://xanadu.com/), still alive and, if not kicking, at least biting.
At the time his thoughts were stunningly original, as we had just entered the "hypermedia era," at that time primarily evidenced by Apple's HyperCard software, while a much smaller company named Owl introduced GUIDE, a more sophisticated technology, but doomed by Apple's better-marketed and more accessible effort. I remember receiving a call from a now not-much-remembered genius of electronic publishing, David Goodstein, who alerted me both to HyperCard and Owl's GUIDE. The possibilities were immediately apparent.
In the years that followed these concepts split off in two directions. On the one hand Tim Bray's World Wide Web emerged, at first a less ambitious, but far more practical and wide-reaching application of the ideas that Ted Nelson had been espousing.
A short time later (circa 1998) we were introduced to eBooks, book-length material on dedicated hardware that tried to take some advantage of many of the concepts of hypermedia.
Well, there's no point in going on here about the success of the Web.
eBooks are another story.
In their first incarnation they failed miserably.
Why did they fail?
I think there were two key reasons. The obvious one was that early on the eBook industry became fixated with dedicated hardware devices. They were expensive, and not much more functional for reading electronic books than the average PC. It made sense as a business model to embrace selling some hardware along with some bits and bytes, but it didn't make much sense to consumers.
More profoundly eBooks failed because there was a mismatch between form and content. The essential fact is that the average printed book provides a far more appealing "form factor" than a $500 piece of hardware.
The format of books is directly related to a long-ago set of manufacturing limitations and economic realities. The challenge for the future is to rethink what books have traditionally offered, and to adapt that towards the remarkable digital technology we now have available.
In those early days of eBooks many were disappointed, trained to assume that anything that ran on batteries and could display text and graphics must be a good thing. Back in those heady eBook days there was an Open eBook Forum that offered a format based on XML and defined as the Open eBook Publication Structure Specification (OeBPS) (since reorganized as The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF)-see below).
As the market for eBooks shrank smaller than the market for original medieval manuscripts at Sotheby's auctions, I started to wonder what all of this might be good for. I saw that I was more than happy to read short articles on my computer (or iPaq or Treo) but that I just didn't feel that my notebook computer did justice to Tolstoy's War and Peace. The big problem with eBooks is the name, with the implicit connotation that we should be reading lightweight paperbacks on heavy digital readers. I now think of "eContent" rather than eBooks. There's a lot of digital information - most of it much shorter than book-length - that makes more sense to be consumed digitally than it does to be printed before consumption.
These days, the old Open eBook Forum is called The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). To me this represents an acceptance of eContent - that eBooks are not the whole story. The challenge is to put various media, of any length or form, into an electronic format that can be consumed with the same or better ease as offered by the print medium.
At the same time the IDPF is creating common standards for use by all eBook publishers. Previously an Acrobat eBook needed adjustment according to its intended reading device, and, at the same time, PDF files could not be read on the Microsoft eBook Reader, and vice-versa.
"We're looking to create the MP3 for e-books," says Nick Bogaty, former executive director of the IDPF. The Unified OEBPS Container Format Working Group has now released two new formats to allow publishers to offer only a single standard file into their sales and distribution channels instead of the multiple proprietary files that they currently produce. Current OEBPS standards are available here http://www.idpf.org/specs.htm.
The IDPF reported earlier in a press release in 2006 that eBook sales increased 23% in Q2 2005. Not bad, until one realizes that this represents under $12 million in revenue, and that unit sales were flat. As in all things digital, the result led publishers to increase title output by 20%, year over year.
There has not been a subsequent press release on sales numbers, but there is data available from the IDPF, including the chart reproduced below, showing sales up until Q4, 2007, suggesting that 2007 sales approximated $32 million. This number should be compared to overall U.S. book sales in 2007 of $36.8 billion -- not yet much of a dent in the demand for printed books.
eBook Sales Through Q4, 2007. Source: IDPF
Interestingly, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) released an entirely different set of figures. The AAP, it should be remembered, while referring to itself as "the principal trade association of the U.S. book publishing industry" represents roughly 300 of the 70,000 publishers in the U.S., although certainly the majority of the larger publishers. In a press release dated April 7, 2008, the AAP reported that ("according to preliminary estimates...e-book sales jumped 23.6%, to a still very modest $67.2 million" (while audiobook sales climbed nearly 20% to roughly $220 million). Confusingly, in a June 11, 2008 press release, the same association stated that "e-book sales...posted an increase of 35.7 percent for the year," without releasing a sales total (other than that March 2008 sales were $4.4 million). Interestingly the same release claims that rather than a 20% increase, audiobooks suffered a 17.2% decrease." All of this was revised again in a June 23rd release, with ebooks now posting "an increase of 36.1 percent for the year," and audiobook sales down 13%. Do they mean year-to-date? It's unclear. This association may be in need of a new statistician.
Lots of folks from the school of "how dare they say that print will die" became adherents of the sub-class of "they dared to say that print will die, but look what happened to eBooks!" I heard it said many (too many) times. The theory wasn't very complex or profound. Basically it said only that as eBooks were clearly a part of the electronic publishing revolution (which, by some mystical connection has been associated with the concept of "print is dead") and as eBooks had (thus far) failed commercially, then the (purported) purveyors of the "print is dead" theorem were way off base.
I never looked at it that way. In the first place, I'd never been a fan of eBooks, not of the broad concept, and certainly not of the dedicated eBook devices. Most of them were priced in the $300-$500 range, while offering very little functionality beyond the average notebook computer. So they made even less sense when notebook computers themselves could be bought as cheaply as a less than a thousand dollars, and notebooks weren't all that heavier or more ungainly than the eBook readers. But most of all, it was clear that the paperback book had been, and continued to be, a very fine invention, the best to date for pouring over hundreds of pages of mostly pure (non-illustrated) text.
Nonetheless, back in the millennial year 2000 I purchased my first Compaq iPaq. Although the color screen measured only 2.25 by 3.00 inches, it was a revelation in its ability to display text and graphics. I found that it was perfect for reading plain text newsletters, and that year sat on a train across France and Germany catching up on my office reading.
But these devices, particularly in the years since 2000, can now display a wide variety of media, even movies, which is why I prefer to think of the category as eContent. While markets and usage for books (and other verbally-oriented content) differ widely than the market specifics for old TV shows on iPods, the portability of the content is perhaps its most salient feature.
As always in the current technology revolution we stumble a little when some piece of hardware appears to be inextricably linked to a certain piece of software functionality. Should we focus on the hardware, the software, or both?
eContent can be defined simply: the presentation of text and images, in two or more dimensions. The devices used are an important consideration, but do not overtake the basic idea of eContent, or its conceptual functionality.
So what about ePaper? It's hardware medium (although usually not very hard). And it can display a broad range of media. But I think that in the case of ePaper, the medium is at least as important as the content. There are many things that can only done on the specific "hardware" medium of ePaper that cannot practically or economically be performed on other electronic media. For this reason I'm resisting the temptation to toss ePaper into eContent. I address it in a separate section.
In the meantime, eContent is a nascent yet terrifically important part of the electronic publishing revolution.
eBooks Return (again)
The Sony eBook Reader
In an October 27, 2008 entry on Dave Mainwaring's Publishers' SIG at http://www.printplanet.com/, someone named Chet Ensign wrote: "I have just read the press release at http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200610/102406DigitalEditions.html for Adobe's beta release of Digital Editions. It is an eBook reader that uses PDF, XHTML, and Flash and includes digital rights management support, subscriptions, ads, etc.
He continues: "I have not seen anything like a groundswell of excitement in publishing around eBooks so I don't see this as a major development. In a review on ZDNet, Ryan Stewart wrote: "Users have been slow to take to eReader solutions, but I think technologies like the New York Times reader and Digital Editions are going to change that." I don't agree. I think people are not adopting ereaders because they add nothing new; they still just move print to the screen - where I personally just turn around and reprint so that I can read it in print.
"What do others think? Is there more excitement around eBooks than I have been seeing?"
I wonder the same thing...
Somehow I think iPod when I read in Adobe PR of the new software:
"With native support for Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) as well as an XHTML-based reflow-centric publication format, Digital Editions delivers an engaging way to acquire, read, and manage content, including eBooks, digital magazines, digital newspapers and other digital publications. Initially available as a free public beta for Windows, Digital Editions will support Macintosh systems as a universal binary application, Linux platforms, as well as mobile phones and other embedded devices in future versions."
(Check out Adobe Digital Editions, [now in a 1.5 version].You'll also find a link to a dozen or so free samples.)
Somehow I also think about pending competition between Adobe and Microsoft on file formats, the long rumored battle of the PDF versus the XPS (although Wikipedia informs us: "XPS is viewed as a potential competitor to Adobe's portable document format (PDF). XPS, however, is a static document format that does not include dynamic capabilities similar to those of PDF.")
When I was first looking into this a few month's back I wrote: "Microsoft doesn't seem too hot on eBooks right now. Microsoft Reader was last updated in November, 2002 (the Tablet edition), although I was surprised to find today on the Microsoft website: "Microsoft Reader Catalog of eBooks: search over 30000 free and retail ebooks, with direct links to downloading free content and samples: www.mslit.com/default.asp?mjr=FRE." However, looking more closely at the site, one finds that most of the eBooks are for sale, not free at all.
Now I see that Microsoft has been quietly updating its Reader program. Perhaps it's just a site update. The version of Reader I installed a few month's ago is 2.1.1.3143, dated © 2000. I install the version available today and find it's exactly the same one, © 2000, although the download page claims "Updated: May 19, 2005." Nope, I guess that Microsoft is not too hot on eBooks right now.
The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library does offer 2100 free eBooks (old titles, out of copyright - http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/)
Still, it turns out I hadn't bothered installing Reader on my current 6-month-old computer - I'm doing it now - to find out if I get any more pleasure out of reading Dickens' Tale of Two Cities on a computer now than I did (not) four years ago (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/lit/DicTale.lit).
As my friend Crad Kilodney once wrote in a short story, sadly now out of print: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, it was a Monday."
References