Forrester Research projects the electronic books could be a $436 million market by 2004. The makers of e-book "readers" like the Rocket eBook think that's a conservative estimate. They see a couple of million of their devices in the hands of readers by then, with folks reading away on all kinds of titles. They're not as optimistic as Andersen Consulting who thinks that by 2005 e-books will account for ten percent of all consumer book sales and that seventy percent of those sales will be in addition to (not replacing) sales of printed books.
But wait. The "Consumer Book Buying Study 2000" by Publisher's Weekly gives us a different picture. They asked 1140 Internet users who had purchased a book between July 1999 and July 2000 the following question. "Will electronic books replace printed books?" Only four thought they would. Not four percent. Four.
How can we make sense of this? Let's start with the Publisher's Weekly question. We should know by now that asking folks who have no experience of a new technology if they will use it is a question guaranteed to get a "No." Folks could not imagine themselves using a personal computer until they saw others using one. They consistently said they wouldn't buy online, until their friends bought and newspaper stories showed others buying. So the question as asked won't give us much of a clue.
What will? The only thing that will work, I think, is a reasoned look at what books are and how we create them, sell them and use them.
The fact is that what makes a thing a "book" has changed a lot over time. Today's "official" definition of a book by the United Nation's statistical office is "a non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages." That's similar to the definition the US Postal Service uses to qualify an item for its special Book Rate. The problem is that those are definitions anchored in physical print and paper. They show us the present, but not the future. To get an idea of where we're going we have to look elsewhere.
Let's start with history. The first books weren't books at all as we think of them. They were scrolls. And they were read aloud. The way most people experienced books then was having them read to them.
Because they were produced by hand, books were rare. Rich people might have them. And rich institutions like the church. The content of those books the most important knowledge of the age. It included the Bible, Bible commentaries and lots of other religious material.
As we move into the fifteenth century, the number of books was small. It was limited because of the technologies of production and because of the small numbers of readers and writers. There was no book business because there was no market in any sizable sense.
Throughout history, what a book is and how many books there are has been defined by a dance of technology and the wants and needs of people. Possibilities were created by one and exploited by the other. Sometimes it was technology leading. Sometimes it was the wants and needs of people.
What if there had been a Publisher's Weekly then to ask folks who used books what they thought about using on of those new "books" being turned out by Gutenberg and others? The people probably would have said that they wouldn't use such a thing because, after all, the current system met their needs quite well, thank you.
The first books that came from the magical printing press looked a lot like the hand-produced books they replaced. Some owners who bought unadorned printed books hired artists to illuminate them and craftspeople to fashion covers for them.
The first printed books did not have features we now take for granted. There were no page numbers, table of contents or indexes. Those became possible and necessary (which came first is a chicken-and-egg question) as books became more common and popular.
Electronic books will probably follow a similar development pattern. First, like any new technology, e-books will strive to look like paper books. We'll try to use them in the same ways that we use paper books. Then, things will begin to change.
We'll find new ways to use "books." That will open up new possibilities. Look at some of the things we're already seeing.
Take the various textbook publishers who are allowing professors to put together custom textbooks made up of sections from what would be different paper textbooks, in the order specified by the professor.
Check out the book "Now, Discover Your Strengths" by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton of the Gallup Organization. Part of the book is a regular old paper book. Part of the book is an online analytical tool called "StrengthsFinder."
For that matter, take a walk or click through the children's book section at your bookstore. Look at how many children's books already have some form of interactivity built in.
You can expect that whatever most e-books turn out to look like, they will probably use the strengths of different media. Look for mixes of book, website, CD and more to make up a "book."
There will also be new methods of distribution. Those are hard to project right now because the publishing industry as a whole is filled with terror at the prospect of some Napster-like free sharing system.
Publishers are so scared, in fact, that they're currently falling off the other side of the horse and piling so many restrictions on electronic distribution that they render the product almost useless. It's like being so worried about your child getting into trouble with the car that you take the wheels of it. You've solved one problem, but created another. In time, though we'll find ways to use the technology to distribute books differently.
The long term trend to toward less restriction and wider distribution. That's true whether it's publishing the Bible in languages besides Latin, or whether it's finding less expensive ways to share the same content.
Think about paperback books. The first ones to be published were "trashy." They were referred to with terms like "Dime Novel" and "Penny Dreadful." It wasn't till 1938 that serious books appeared in paperback at all. The first one was "The Good Earth" by Pearl Buck.
Early reviews of those paperbacks commented on how hard they were to read because of poor type and paper. There were comments about how the paperback Pocket Books changed the experience that a reader got with "real" (hardbound) books. Sound familiar?
The early versions of a technology or distribution method simply don't work as well as they should. Because they're unfamiliar, we tend to downgrade them. But we have to look at the big, background trend again. Here' that trend is toward more kinds, rather than fewer.
Before Gutenberg, books were about socially important things, mostly religious, but in the years since we've created kinds of books that Gutenberg wouldn't even recognize.
There was the novel. This long prose narrative wasn't a kind of book until way after Gutenberg. You have to fast forward to at least 1605 (Don Quixote) or even more commonly to the early eighteenth century (Henry Fielding and a host of English writers). You couldn't have books like this until you could produce books easily. The technology made for possibility.
There are books that aren't primarily text. This weekend, the Most Beautiful Woman and the World visited friends and marveled over a book of photographs one had been given for Christmas. There are books with hardly a word in them by photographers like Diane Arbus and David Douglas Duncan and books by photographers like Gordon Parks that mix words and text.
And could Gutenberg even conceive of the book that the Most Beautiful Woman in the World tells me is the best book in the world? I refer, of course, to "Pat the Bunny." I don't take this lightly. Surely a book that delivers both a learning experience and way for parent and child to bond is as meaningful as the most learned tome.
It is on this hinge of purpose that I think the future of e-books will turn. Technology will expand our possibilities and we develop new purposes, but for now here is how I imagine our current purposes affecting the future.
We use books in different ways. Some we read straight through, like a novel or biography. For the foreseeable future, I think their preferred form will be paper. There is no technology I see on the horizon that will make reading a novel in any digital form remotely close to the experience of a book.
There are other books that we use occasionally (manuals, references or textbooks) or for a limited period of time (guidebooks for the country I'm visiting next month). The more that they are heavy and expensive and searched, the more I see digital as the preferred method of delivery. Multiply that if they are often used in remote locations.
I also see digital forms and distribution as effective for forms that don't work well in the current print publishing industry. I think that's part of the reason behind some of the success of Stephen King's "Riding the Bullet," which was a novella.
Look for combination net and pocket versions for material that is newsy or needs frequent updating. But don't expect folks to do a lot of reading off small, grungy screens. Usability studies on websites tell us that folks prefer to scan and search digital tools, but when it comes time to read, they print things out on paper.
What's ahead for us is lots of change and conflict and success and failure. We'll witness the development of new "book" forms even as old forms continue to be used. We'll also see consequences that we can't foresee. One of the major results of Gutenberg's printing revolution was the Protestant Reformation.
Without Gutenberg, Luther would have been just a troublesome monk. With Gutenberg Luther was able to sweep his miner's son's arm across the tables of debate to clear them for different topics. The printed book revolution changed the world. So will the e-book revolution.
This feature appeared on 8 January 2001
