It would be amazing to have all my books in a handheld device.

What has put me off buying so far is the fact that a uniform format has not been settled on. We are still in the Betamax v VHS stage.

I don’t want to purchase dozens of books and then find I can’t read them in a few years time. Also the cost of readers and especially ebooks are still too high.

Think about your study or living room – I bet one or the other has a few dirty great shelves, packed with reference manuals and novels. How the feck’ do I prove that I’m intelligent when that’s reduced to an ebook reader in a dock?

p.s. congrats on the interface directions for posting! it’s the first one I’ve seen that told me exactly what to do if I got the anti-spam word wrong.

> Publishers have to learn how to publish economically with new platforms and new distribution. If they don’t, they won’t make it.

Yes. Absolutely.

Rutty:
> Electronic books are a much more efficient way of delivering content to users without the need to print out on expensive paper.

I agree. the hard bit is getting the business model right. I’m inclined to believe that the real reason music piracy is so prevalent is because the record companies haven’t come up with compelling, legal services: never mind locking the stable door after the horse has bolted; they spent a decade pretending the horse was still there. Look at Apple’s iphone app store: piracy of those apps exists, but most users can’t be bothered. The challenge to publishers IMO is to find that kind of model rather than the ones the music biz has been chasing: the iTunes App Store for books, not MSN Music for books :)

OK, here’s the thing. Electronic goods have a much smaller production/distribution cost to the physical versions. Books, even more so than CDs. If eReaders take off (and they will when they become cheap enough) there’s the potential for publishers to receive bigger margins than present.

Piracy is obviously a problem, but the people I’ve read that have tried this (and I take your point about internet celebs here Gary) tend to report that the electronic versions haven’t hurt their sales of physical books. John Scalzi was another one to do this.

I think it has promise. Electronic books are a much more efficient way of delivering content to users without the need to print out on expensive paper.

It’ll be interesting where this goes. I’m sure that there’ll be differing effects in different genres but I also hope that the cheaper distribution costs will help both the writers and publishers

> When authors figure out that they can make a lot more money selling directly to the reader at $1.99 a pop (netting about 70%) publishers will disappear.

I think you might be right. The numbers are interesting, though: if you assume that paid apps account for 1/3 of the total (which is probably over-optimistic, but I’ve no idea what the numbers are) that’s 1/3 of 35,000, or about 12,000 apps accounting for around 300,000,000 downloads. At $1.99 a pop that’s 25,000 downloads an app, with the authors pocketing $71,000 each. Obviously that’s going to be distorted by the big hitters – both in terms of what they charge and the numbers they get – so my gut feeling is that you’ve got a handful of really big numbers doing big money, and a lot of apps bringing in beer money. Pretty much like publishing and music is now :)

Right now, though, I think publishers are making the same mistake as the music business. Ebooks aren’t any cheaper than printed ones most of the time, and in many cases they’re actually more expensive than the printed ones. If prices don’t go down fast, publishers will be giving books away for free against their will via DRM cracking and illegal copying. Especially when ebook readers of whatever shape are more popular than they are now: currently the Kindle skews to an older, more honest demographic.

I think what’s interesting is how authors will get exposure. When I interviewed some successful iPhone app developers things like being picked by Apple were huge factors, and word of mouth was a big deal too. To an extent publishers do that job now, whether by inking deals with bookshops for prominent displays and/or ads, or by running adverts, getting books to the right reviewers and so on. It’ll be interesting to see whether authors embrace it, with all the work that entails, or if they prefer to hide behind the skirts of traditional big publishers. Could be interesting.

This would be a very good time to start a good, professional, serious ebook review site, you know.