Barnes and Noble has announced that it would no longer sell e-books.
"Oh, my!" the pundits cried, throwing up their hands, "people don't like e-books. E-books are not living up to expectations." They're wrong about people not liking e-books, but they're dead right about those expectations.
Way back in 2000 experts projected that e-book sales would total $250 million a year by 2005. The way that things have gone so far, that would take a miracle. E-book sales were only $5 million in the first half of 2003.
That forecasting error was mostly a triumph of enthusiasm over common sense. You see that kind of error a lot in technological forecasts made by folks inside an industry. What's more disturbing is that it's still happening three years later.
Right after the Barnes and Noble announcement the CEO of the retailer PalmGear had this comment. "(On Wednesday) we sold 2,000 e-books. It was the largest retail day at Palm Digital Media in 2003, and we are having the largest month ever," He went on to forecast that his company would sell 1.3 million e-books in the next twelve months.
Could he actually mean that? 1.3 million e-books works out to 3561 e-books a day. That's a daily rate that's almost 80 percent higher than his highest day so far.
That seems like another expectation that e-books won't live up to. But what about people not liking them?
One thing seems pretty certain. Most folks don't like reading fiction on small and mostly-dysfunctional e-books that I call a "gadget-based" e-books. There are two kinds of gadgets.
Some gadgets are special e-book reader thing-a-ma-bobs like the RocketBook or the eBookman. These will cost you a hundred bucks or so. For this you get a device that's about the size of a paperback and the pleasure of worrying about what will happen if you drop it.
Real people, who generally have more sense than product designers, have stayed away from these gadgets in droves. But they're not the only gadgets you can use to read an e-book.
You can download an e-book to your Personal Digital Assistant, Pocket PC or your cell phone. Can you imagine reading a John Grisham novel on that tiny little screen on your cell phone? I can't either. If the only e-books were gadget-based, then I'd understand why people might not like them.
But all is not gloom and doom in e-book land. We may not want to read fiction on tiny little electronic gadgets, but there are some kinds of "books" that are doing well in e-form.
Reference books have some real benefits in electronic form, like portability and searchability. Let's say you're a physician. You used to need to have some standard references, like the Physician's Desk Reference nearby for ready consultation, but now you can have it with you on your Personal Digital Assistant.
Yep, you can have the PDR on your PDA. You can have other medical references there, too, portable and searchable. It's an e-book idea that works.
E-books are a good choice when you want some information right away. There are folks all over the Web offering special purpose books. There are a couple of these sites on how to give a wedding toast. How-to books seem to be an e-book idea that works.
Years ago, my parents invested big bucks in a set of encyclopedias that was out of date before we unpacked it. Now you can have full access to an up to date Britannica online for less than fifty bucks a year. It's an e-book that works, too.
You can search and read the encyclopedia articles online, following links where you will, or you can print things out to read later. And that, as it turns out, is what most people do.
Most of us don't read online. Instead we scan till we find something of interest. Then we print it out for later reading. If you understand that, then the world of e-books doesn't look so different or so daunting.
What's really going on here is that our definition of "book" is changing. That's happened before.
In the one hundred years after Gutenberg invented his printing system both books and reading changed dramatically. Before Gutenberg books were on religious topics or the wisdom of the Greeks and Romans. A hundred years later there were all kinds of secular books in print.
Before Gutenberg people read their books aloud to share them with others. A hundred years later individuals could have their own book. So, people stopped reading out loud and started reading silently.
Before Gutenberg you pretty much read a book one way, from beginning to end. A hundred years later people wanted to find their way around different books, maybe only reading a bit of each at a time. So, books began to have devices that we now take for granted like page numbers, tables of contents and indexes.
This time around, we're moving toward defining a book as a collection of information or narrative that can be presented in different formats depending on how we're going to use the contents of the book.
Reference material will probably be most popular in electronic form. It will be updated frequently from the Web. Some of it will need to be portable, so it will be read from a gadget.
At the other end of the spectrum, material that like fiction and other narrative that people read straight through will be most popular in printed form. Somewhere between reference and narrative will be learning materials and scholarly materials that call for both reading and searching.
Guess what? People will like the book forms that work for them, sometimes e-books and sometimes paper.
Here's my bet. You'll use e-books for reference and help at work and to help your child with a homework assignment on ancient Hittites. But when you relax with a novel or read that child a bedtime story, you'll probably use a paper book.
