eBooks: time will tell

eBooks and their manufacturers have brought something of a culture shift to the profession of publishing.

Print publishers are – to say the least – conservative about spending money on publicity.

eBooks, however, are a product of the consumer electronics industry. Like the motor-industry of old, this thrives on innovation and obsolescence, styling and fashion, and on products with a short life-span.  To keep its product-cycle churning, the consumer electronics industry spends huge sums on advertising. It supports a legion of specialist journalists and magazines.

Although eBooks represent only a small fraction of the total book market, the eBook industry is currently making a huge promotion effort. Every day some new “expert” tells us that eBooks will soon take over; that traditional books are doomed.

This publicity must be costing a lot, and there is nothing altruistic about it. The dream is that eBook readers will become a consumer fashion-item like mobile phones. Users, once hooked, will regularly buy the latest eBook reader, while contributing to an everlasting income-stream from eBook downloads.

For the campaign to pay off, however, the industry needs to convert many, many more people to eBooks.

Will the dream come true? I don’t know. For the present, it seems to me that eBook readers are far too expensive. A high-spec reader would make a big hole in my book-buying budget. Most of the books I buy are for long-term use – but for the consumer-electronics industry “long term” is anathema. Printed books can last hundreds of years. Is there anything to guarantee that today’s eBook downloads will be readable on tomorrow’s readers? I already have that problem, as a publisher, accessing the electronic typesetting files of books we issued a few years ago. Newer versions of the same software won’t read files created in earlier versions. New computers won’t run the old software. So each year I have to spend time recovering and converting valuable data.

Mobile phones offered something new and uniquely useful – the ability to communicate on the move. The selling-point of eBooks is far weaker. They have to compete with an existing product that has been in universal use for centuries – and the reader/download combination is not cheap.

Mobile phones also succeeded because phone calls are widely used in business and in private life. Reading books, for many people, is a more occasional activity. If you read one book a month, and if downloads cost as much as a paperback, how could you possibly justify the additional cost of an eBook reader – a fragile, expensive machine that might be completely outdated within two or three years?

Yes, there are circumstances and applications where eBooks offer users an advantage over printed books. But those circumstances and applications are not universal. Would the offer of an eBook download look like much of a Christmas present?

The current blizzard of propaganda for eBooks makes it hard, if not impossible, to know what’s really happening. For me, though, the eBook reader/download combination appears to come at a hefty price. When you add in the technical uncertainties, the proposition doesn’t look so compelling.