Ebook Trends for the Year 2001
© Manuel Viloria
1.0 Ebooks requiring hardware devices will die in the mass market.
Big name companies are aggressively entering the ebook market but the fact remains that reading from a screen is a painful activity. The mass market will still turn to traditional printed books as a source of entertainment.
This trend can be reversed by the introduction of "easier to read and carry" ebook readers. It will also help if more books can be stored in a particular reading device, and if more open standards are embraced (meaning any ebook reader can read any ebook).
When will we achieve this utopic dream? Check out this column in the year 2003.
2.0 Ebooks or digital textbooks will thrive in academic or research circles.
The need for more information and the conservation of schoolbag space will motivate students and researchers to make increasing use of electronic textbooks. True, it will still be hard to read information off a screen, so ebooks which allow easy printing (i.e., PDF files and html compiled versions) will be the favorites.
It's easy to get a captive market, specially from the point of view of some teachers (The following references are required, kids... You can get them from my web site.).
The main advantage of ebooks for researchers is searching speed. Hence, ebooks which allow the reader to easily search through the text not only in a page, but in the entire ebook itself, will get a greater share of the market.
No, we're not talking about typical encyclopedias on a disk. Look more at niche or specialty topics that involve a lot of information and a lot of text. So yes, you can expect libraries to start converting some of their special and delicate collections into ebooks.
3.0 Ebooks will become more digitally secure... for a while.
Remember what happened to Stephen King and the Plant ebook? It seems that not enough people were willing to pay for the downloads so King stopped the electronic installments. This, of course, affected the honest customers who paid and who expected King to finish the ebook.
This year, ebook authors will look more seriously into securing their work and preventing others from easily copying or electronically passing along the document.
