Interesting read, plus I like your template. Thanks!

The biggest challenge for e-books is not the readers as many claim. Instead it is the books themselves. As I posted recently in my blog, and as Joe Wikert is alluding to in a comment above is that we must stop thinking about e-books as the “pdf copy” of the printed book.

‘0’s and ‘1’s have much more potential to be dynamic and connected than paper.

I tend to believe success here won’t just come from a killer device alone. We’ve also got to start thinking differently about the content and how it’s built/presented. It’s been said many times that the early TV shows were nothing more than radio programs made in front of a camera. It took awhile for everyone to learn how to truly leverage the new medium.

The same is true for e-readers. Simply porting a printed book to an e-device isn’t terribly exciting. There’s no depth to the content. How about layering the content so that I can drill down deeper into it, but only when I want/need to? How about creating rich linkage between other bodies of work so that I’ve got a very useful resource, one that can’t be replicated in the print world?

Taking advantage of the e-reader medium and re-thinking how content needs to be written, edited and presented is the key. Btw, a novel is a novel, for the most part, and may not benefit much from this. But think of the possibilities for most reference and how-to works…

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/12295/page1/

So you have a chicken and egg problem. While publishers are resistant to putting much of their catalog online for lack of demand or fear of piracy, readers aren’t likely to invest in eBook reading devices if there’s not content they’re interested in. Until these issues are resolved, I think the eBook market’s growth will stay stunted for a while.

I just wanted to thank you for that, and also compliment you on a fantastic blog. I’m going to become a regular here.

Mike Elgan
Computerworld