Home » Writing & Publishing » E-Book Publishing » Next-Generation E-Books

Next-Generation E-Books

© Manuel Viloria

The dot-com failures and dwindling advertising revenues are slowly pushing more people to start charging for content. Along with this thought come concerns of copy-protecting information with the help of ebooks.

But given the lukewarm reception of consumers to e-books, electronic publishers are looking into developing "next-generation" e-books. Here are examples of evolution in action, and how to find a better path towards epublishing profits.

1.0 Comic books as e-books

E-book Initiative Japan (EBI) President and CEO Yuusuke Suzuki believes that there will be a demand for comics in the e-book market because comic books account for 40% of the current publication market in Japan. (See "Adobe Turning Japanese" - http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/main_news... )

Traditionally, e-books contain mostly text with a sprinkling of graphics. With manga or anime comics in e-book form, this will probably be mostly images.

But will this work? Distribution may be an issue since graphic-intensive e-books will be quite large, in terms of file size. In addition, comic book lovers tend to be tactile; they like to gently hold and turn the pages of a comic book before reverently tucking it back into a special plastic case.

Comics as e-books will become popular if the publishers can tackle the ease of copying issue. If they can assure a limited production of a particular e-book, perhaps such e-books can gain some sort of "exclusivity" or "limited edition" status which will make them worth buying and collecting.

If, however, these e-comic books will be anything similar to present e-books (read: easy to copy and share with others), then it will most likely not succeed in the electronic market. Unless, of course, the main point is to tempt consumers to get the printed version.

2.0 Edu-Television as e-books

Today's e-books look mostly like coffee table books: text and images. Next-generation versions will have a significantly larger amount of video.

Thinkwell (http://www.thinkwell.com) calls itself the "next-generation texbook" because it is an electronic book filled with videos and comes together with a customized website.

The customization follows the particular syllabus of the educator. After students go through the e-textbook, they are led to a website where they can take a number of quizzes. The results are quickly obtained. But the main advantage to educators is that they can tell at a glance which particular learning points the class, on the average, has the most difficulty with.

Thus, educators can better adapt depending on the needs of their class. There's hardly any guesswork involved since the performance of the class is well-documented with hard data.