Digital Books Start a New Chapter Since at least the 1960s and possibly earlier, we’ve been hearing predictions about the demise of paper.
Xerox famously, and disastrously, attempted to create the “paperless office” in the 1970s.
If anything, we use more paper now than ever, owing to the ease of running off copies with laser printers and copiers.
Despite this failure to get beyond the printed page, one prediction has persisted: the digital book. Plenty of books have been made available in digital form for years now.
The problem has been that no one has wanted to read a book on a computer screen.
And PDAs haven’t been much more appealing than their desktop predecessors.
But, according to BusinessWeek,1 the experts are now saying the e-book’s time has come.
Soon you may see people reading the latest Harry Potter novel or business book on a hand-held device while commuting to work.
So, what’s different now?
Electronic paper is finally ready for prime time.
Electronic paper is an electronic display medium with the aesthetics of traditional paper.
The Trends editors have been following the electronic paper concept for more than a decade, and we’ve seen promising concepts fail to reach commercialization because they could not overcome hurdles related to cost, manufacturability, durability, contrast, and/or other parameters.
But now, a company called E Ink has developed a proprietary technology that uses nearly microscopic capsules arranged like the drops of ink from an ink-jet printer.
The capsules are the diameter of a human hair and contain a fluid in which millions of microscopic particles, either black or white, are floating.
The white particles have a positive charge, while the black particles are negative.
By applying an electrical field to each individually-addressable capsule, you can change it from black to white and vice versa by forcing one or the other kind of particles to the surface, where they become visible.
The same charge pushes the opposite color below, where it remains hidden from view.
This ink, in the form of millions of these capsules, is suspended in a liquid that can be printed onto any surface and controlled in the same way that pixels on your computer screen are controlled.
This important development has prompted Sony to adopt E Ink for its digital book reader, which is about the size of a paperback book and holds 80 average-sized books.
By logging onto Sony’s Connect store, you can download thousands of books.
And, by using a memory stick, the Sony Reader can store hundreds of them at one time.
Sony, in short, appears positioned to make up for its huge blunder in letting Apple get ahead of it in portable music with the iPod.
The Sony Reader, available soon for about $400, will lead a field that everyone is watching closely.
But there are still problems to be sorted out if digital books are to become mainstream.
For example, publishers have been indecisive about what role they want to play.
Google started an initiative about a year ago to digitize millions of books to create a searchable database, eliciting cries of foul from publishers and authors and touching off a lawsuit from a group of publishers for copyright infringement, which has not yet been settled.
Then, in the wake of that suit, Random House and HarperCollins both announced that they were going to start offering digital titles, starting with 25,000 books each.
Amazon now sells many books in digital form, along with short stories, novellas, and magazine articles, all downloadable from its Web site.
It is also planning a service through which readers can read books on the Web from wherever they happen to be.
So, for example, they could access whatever they’re currently reading on a broad set of devices, ranging from a laptop to a cell phone or even a special digital book interface like the Sony Reader.
And as you would expect with such a potentially big market, there are other devices entering ? or trying to enter ? the market to compete with Sony.
But so far, none stands out as a clear contender.
Jinke is a company in China that will enter the educational field with a reader.
And Plastic Logic in England is designing a device that looks like a standard piece of printed paper but can receive content wirelessly.
Its partner is NTT DoCoMo in Japan, but its product won’t be ready until 2008.
In light of this trend, we ask you to consider the following five forecasts:
First, the digital book will create a growing and important market, but it may take five more years before a refined value proposition takes the mass market by storm.
As the Trends editors forecasted more than a decade ago, the e-book is an “inevitability.”
But it’s been waiting for the crucial technology of electronic paper before it could germinate.
This breakthrough is not analogous to the Sony Walkman or Apple iPod.
Putting on headphones and listening to music is a very different experience from reading a book, which takes effort and concentration.
To make the digital book a popular success will take not only an extremely elegant and easy-to-use device, but possibly, value-added features, such as the ability to make notes in the margins or to create a complete document-handling device.
According to The Wall Street Journal,2 Sony’s test marketing of its reader in Japan hasn’t gone well, because the company insisted on controlling content too heavy-handedly.
So even with Sony’s head start, a disruptive start-up with a great solution could come along and steal the market.
Second, to create a mass market, digital book readers will be discounted to under $100 soon after introduction.
With video game consoles, the money is in the games; with DVD players, the money is in the DVDs; and with Digital Books, money is in the content.
Therefore, we expect the $400 Sony Reader and similar devices to be discounted to $99 or less in an effort to reach mass market penetration.
Third, expect a rapid proliferation of incompatible devices and download services as companies scramble to capture market share in the next few years.
But within five years, the industry will begin to converge on standards for processing and downloading all text-based information so that anything can be read with any device.
As with the VHS for video recording, the standard that survives the shake out may not be the best, just one that’s good enough.
Fourth, as content reaches critical mass in the next three to five years, publishers will have to rethink their business model, which is at present, stuck in the 19th century.
Most publishers live off of a very few best-sellers or a perennial back-list of items like textbooks.
Everything else they publish is essentially a blind experiment in which a book is given 90 days to prove itself or be “remaindered.”
As previously discussed in Trends, the coming world of “total connectivity” and Web-based services will permit the bulk of sales to come from “the long tail.”
That means that many obscure titles, each selling a few copies a month, can bring in more money than a few big best-sellers.
With physical books made of paper and sold in bookstores, that model simply wasn’t practical.
But with electronic books that cost nothing to distribute, it suddenly becomes imperative. Expect a few smart publishers ? perhaps represented by new start-ups ? to begin using long tail business models to sell digital books.
Fifth, whether it is through the use of E Ink or some better technology not yet invented, wireless digital paper is the future of traditional print content like books, newspapers, and magazines.
With the ability to call up and download The Wall Street Journal or Harvard Business Review instantly from anywhere, publishers will be hard-pressed to keep the bulky, expensive paper versions alive.
Paper editions will hang on to satisfy readers who still want them out of habit and comfort, but paper publications will gradually die with the Baby Boom generation.
We will, in other words, witness at least a small step toward the long-predicted “paperless world.” References List :
1. BusinessWeek, February 27, 2006, “Digital Books Start a New Chapter,” by Burt Helm. ⓒ Copyright 2006 by McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
2. The Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2006, “Sony Sets Its Sights on Digital Books,” by Ginny Parker Woods. ⓒ Copyright 2006 by Dow Jones & Company. All rights reserved.
