e-book displays down at Book Expo

Book Expo wrapped up this week in Chicago. Last year e-books were all the buzz. This year it was back to business as usual. E-book displays clocked in at around 80, compared to 120 last year. One could read that as bad news for the industry. I read it as good news. The 80 that survived the year of turmoil with dot-coms falling like dominoes, might just make it to next year. The 40 that didn't make it might open up avenues for those that remain. This might be an over simplification because not every e-publisher displays at Book Expo and just because a publisher was there last year and not here this year doesn't mean they have closed down. All in all, it would have been nice to see the numbers increase. Does this mean that e-books are a passing fad? I doubt it. They may be still ahead of their time. Just because you can do something, doesn't mean that it is necessary or acceptable to the public. Most people don't realize that General Electric developed a form of TV in the 1920's but it was too cumbersome and too expensive to market at the time. E-books may be suffering from the same problem. E-book readers are too expensive and some are too cumbersome. Some e-books are too expensive and are not seen as necessary to the general public, who are used to p-books. When will this change? Only when p-books become so expensive that the public stops buying them and when e-book reader become inexpensive enough that the public begins to buy them. When these two converge, e-books will take off, provided that the public is still reading. I don't think it will take the thirty some-odd years to catch on that TV did. Things move too fast these days for that, but it won't happen tomorrow either. Book Expo showed us that. I'm predicting five years and I think I may be long on that but I'm being conservative. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

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