Eoin Purcell's Blog

I was struck by a puzzle this afternoon. Who wants to buy e-books? And not just the current versions which are really just fancy PDFs, but the e-books of the future. Who cares if it has video content of flashy style graphic charts? Who really needs that product?

Isn't that need, the flash and the style, served better by online sites? If you can get online rapidly or even better are constantly online then surely searching the freely available information will be your preference, will most new knowledge be acquired by searching for specific information and not by reading in depth books which contain unnecessary data?

It’s a big issue. Is the noise being made about how to find a new format for books in the electronic age really worth listening to?

Is the book publishing industry fooling itself publishing books at a fierce clip to an ever fragmenting market and an ever reducing readership? The newspaper industry seems to be fooling itself if it sees a future in print. USA Today reports on steep offline readership losses for established papers.

Books work as I have said before. They are not a broken technology. You will never have to stop reading them because your battery is dead. You do not need to carry anything else to read. The only limitation on information is how much weight you chose to carry.

I cannot see e-books delivering such superior features that they surpass books anytime soon, and clearly they do not and will not rate devices on their own even if they did, new formats sound more like blogs or websites then books (not necessarily a bad idea and touching on an idea by Joe Wikert some time ago).

If that is the case then the focus of the book publishing industry needs to shift towards how best to serve the devices that currently exist and which people currently use and will use in the future to gain their content and how to make money from those sources. Or even more realistically to ensuring the continuation of the current, working format, the plain old paperback book.