Avant-Guide

At the turn of the century, many in the book industry excitedly anticipated the advent of the electronic book. With titles like "The Future of Cyberpublishing Is Now!", articles breathlessly told of the undiscovered world of e-book publishing and all its implications for authors, publishers, and the reading public. Paperless books would surely revolutionize the stodgy old book industry. So now, almost a decade later, why do most consumers react to the term "e-book" with a blank stare or casual head-scratch? Should the pronouncements of the e-book future seem as ridiculous to us now as the Y2K scare? [Unrelated fact: The author of doomsday classics The Y2K Personal Survival Guide and Millennium Bug seems to have overcome his embarrassment, becoming the president and CEO of Thomas Nelson, the nation's largest Christian publisher, in 2005.]

Some cite a general wariness with the format as the major reason the e-book fizzled so anticlimactically. Aren't most people who buy books the types who savor sipping coffee in a bookstore, smelling the fresh paper of a printed book? Don't avid readers enjoy coming home and curling up on the couch by the crackling hearth, a bound copy of their favorite novel nestled in their palm? And who wants to look at a fluorescent screen in their free time after they've done so at work for eight hours?

A more concrete answer for the sluggish e-book takeoff can be found in the mind-boggling abundance of formats in which e-books are available and the multiple platforms for accessing them. Pair that abundance with a scarcity of actual e-book content, and you have a situation in which the public won't show interest until there is more material available, but publishers won't put out more material until they see more consumer demand. So all we need for the e-book revolution to take place is, theoretically, an affordable, user-friendly reading device and a large enough pool of similarly formatted e-books to justify purchase of the device.

And the presence of e-books is increasing. HarperCollins, Random House, and (to a smaller extent) Penguin all offer a wide selection on their Web sites. Barnes & Noble entirely dropped e-books in 2003, but Amazon.com's Mobipocket site continues to build an electronic catalog that includes fiction, non-fiction, and reference books, mainly for use on handheld devices. They now have over 40,000 full texts available for purchase. Independent booksellers are jumping on the bandwagon, too. BookSense, a marketing consortium for independent bookstores, just launched a program that allows consumers to purchase e-books through independent booksellers' BookSense-templated sites. And although the American Association of Publishers estimated an overall .03% drop in book sales for 2006, e-books showed the largest gain of any sector, rising 24.1% to 54.4 million. An unimpressive number in sales, perhaps, and certainly not in line with the old dotcom projections, but the significant growth bodes well.

No matter how slowly they're taking hold, electronic books can still be useful to authors and publishers, and may yet play a significant role in the future of the industry. Let's take a look at the good things about e-books:

They sell books: It's widely believed that distribution of free e-books actually boosts traditional sales. Avant-Guide, publishers of a well known series of city guides, have adopted this strategy in hopes that they can increase brand awareness and reach potential customers. Confident that users will be impressed with quality content and head to the bookstore, they offer a selection of their most popular titles in digital form for free. Science fiction author Cory Doctorow is also known for his forward-thinking e-book practices; he's been giving away free copies online for years as a way to sell more in brick-and-mortar stores. In a 2006 article for Forbes, he writes:

Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book--those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They're gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I'm ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing.

In this scenario the argument that people are, in Doctorow's words, "pervy for paper" becomes an argument for e-book distribution: People will download the e-book (or sample chapters) and decide that they'd like to read the entire thing in print format. Of course, your book has to be good for that to happen. But your book is good, right?

They provide extra content: Many e-book editions offers special features, such as author interviews or excerpts from the author's other work, giving them an edge over their printed counterparts.

They have cool features: Advanced reading devices now have excellent resolution that mimics the printed page. In addition, users can highlight passages, make marginal notes (either through keypad entry or stylus), change font size, and read in the dark. E-books also provide a great level of portability, enabling readers to carry the equivalent of a shelf of books around in a device that's usually well under a pound. And you can read them all with one hand. Again, the success of the e-book is contingent on the development of an attractive, functional reader and a critical mass of available titles, and we're getting close.

They can earn you a bit of extra revenue: WOWIO is trying out a new model which consists of offering free e-books for download in exchange for viewing of a few ads. Full-page advertisements are inserted in the e-book documents. The ads can be quickly skipped over and are tailored to the reader's interests based on questions answered during initial registration. Publishers are paid a small amount per download, making the site a great way for publishers and authors to expose their work and make a little money. Visit www.wowio.com for more information.

So don't write off the e-book just yet. Stay tuned for more; in an upcoming article, we'll attempt to unboggle your mind to all those different e-book formats and let you know who's closest in the race for a viable e-book reader.