The London Book Fair 2004 had the future of electronic publishing as the theme of several seminars. Chas Jones reports on what the guest speakers had to say.

There was an early rush to publish digital books. Sales were dismal and the flow of digital content soon dried up. Or so the story goes.

In fact the flow of digital material has continued. The focus for the moment has shifted from fiction towards searchable text. If you are a business user, you can scan the web for the company or personality you want to check out. This makes it a profitable way to supply timely data.

A scientist cannot afford the time or the subscriptions to go through all the printed journals in pursuit of answers. The medical world needs very accurate information to help diagnose and prescribe. Digital data brings incalculable productivity and provenance benefits to the academic community.

Contentlink from Random House has its online ebookstore and Houghton Mifflin set the pace with its move to ereference books. Authors such as Dan Poynter (http://www.parapublishing.com) are using e-books to promote print editions. Electronic samples and trailers are used to sell e-books and printed editions. The digital and print versions work in parallel.

It is not all good news. There are some problems. There are 3 e-book reader formats provided by Palm, Adobe and Microsoft, but this is not another epic market struggle to match the VHS/Betamax or optical disk debacles. These formats seem to coexist as they involve the publisher in only a small overhead because there are no warehouses or production lines to build and stock.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is another perceived problem with the digital format. Nobody would photocopy a whole book but the joy of digital media is the way it can be copied and transmitted. All the e-book readers allow the publisher to restrict copying and printing, although if the geeks turned their attention to the problem they would quickly break the codes. The low cost model being adopted by the e-book business might provide better protection from piracy than encryption.

The successful e-book will not replace the printed book but will be another way of delivering information. The music industry managed to persuade us to purchase the same material in a variety of short-lived formats. The question is: will the book-publishing industry make recycling such a profitable business?

Perhaps the real problem with the e-book is that we’re saddled with a publishing industry with unsustainable overheads and a shrinking catalogue which is printed on dead trees, moved round the world, stored and delivered before half is pulped. Without support and investment, the e-book will do no more than continue its slow growth.

© 2004 Charles Jones