I recently posted a long reply to a good question posted on the Children Books Insider site. This is a frequent discussion for us so I thought I'd post my reply here. Hopefully it will help those of you pondering the question.

"First a disclaimer: I am with www.sharing-books.com so I am biased in favour of e-books.

However it does not mean that we believe paper books will completely disappear. I think it is Bill Gates who said that we overestimate how fast a new technology will change the world but we underestimate how big the change will be. In the mid eighties I worked in the cellular telephone industry, few of us dreamed that one day young people would not even consider having a land line phone. It never crossed the mind of our adult children to have a home line in their appartments. Yet we still have a land line in our home because my wife likes to use it (though I never use it being the family geek).

I am writing this note from a home office with walls and floor covered with paper books. Yet I believe that e-books will inexorably replace most paper books over the long term. Other than artfully created books which will remain with us, most paper books printed today are simply information containers. We have to make sure we do not confused content and container.

PCs and most new mobile phones can contain books and provide a decent reading experience. The development of e-readers is accelerating. Most units available today are still expensive and not completely satisfactory due to either format or proprietary closed distribution systmes for content. Similarly, the first cell phones were limited in functionality and cost $5,000 and up. One thing is sure - the e-readers will keep improving and become as convenient and affordable as today's cell phones.

The wild card we see is the gaming consoles adding reading applications. This is what today's children have in their hands today - not paper books. Some industry estimates report over 15 million Nintendo DS sold in the US in 2008. Add the other gaming devices offered and you see sales totals indicating a change as profound as the cell phone. When we researched the market before founding Sharing-Books, we searched photos of children holding gaming devices. We could not help to remark that most photos showed young boys and that most of them were forwning and looking rather tense as they played the game.

We believe that we have a collective responsibility to offer e-books that can be read on these gaming devices. The devices are ready. Gaming devices can browse the web and most can display e-books. What we need is content adapted to these new containers so that children can have the reading/imagination experience we all had to complement their gaming time. Hopefully our stories can be compelling enough to have them read more and play less.

As we consider e-books, we need to remember Marshall McLuhan's famous quote "the medium is the message". New technology transforms the content. Cell phones made us mobile but their digital capabilities compared to land lines made texting possible. Our children rarely answer their phones - to confirm a family dinner time it is more efficient to text them. Similarly e-books will change how we write and read books. We can lament the change but it will not stop it from happening. We believe it is best to embrace the new possibilities offered by e-books.

Publishing will change. A site like Sharing-Books offers speed publishing. Upload your book, it will be reviewed by our volunteer librarians for appropriateness and usually published within 48 hours. This is highly disruptive for a slow and methodical industry. It shocks elitists that we let the public decide what is a quality book. The truth is that the public always votes with their purchases as to which book has the most real value. What we built in is the ability to upgrade a book rapidly. If a book creator want to edit a book, they can simply upload a new version replacing the previous one. In the web world we use agile development - publish your site, get it out as fast as possible and keep fixing it and improving it. We see a similar process happening to book publishing.

More creators than ever will publish. Universal access to the web and speed publishing sites will unleash an enormous amount of creativity. Removing industry barriers to publishing will permit new authors and books to be read and discovered by millions. Clay Shirky talks about an enormous cognitive surplus. People wanting to create rather than just consuming information. In a few months, without any publicity, Sharing-Books has published 140 books, making it the second largest publisher of new children books in Canada. At this pace we will be a major publisher in North America by the end of the year.

Legal rights will change. We do not believe that Digital Rights Management (DRM) will ever really work to the satisfaction of all parties or that they will resist hackers. Lawsuits like the music and movie industry are engaging in will eventually alienate the audience - especially the younger audience that has grown up with unlimited access to free information. Fighting to maintain the old publishing models will be futile. We chose to offer our books free of DRM and in a widely available format PDF to maximize the exposure our book creators get. We also chose to leave the copyrights in the hand of the book creators.

New business models will emerge. The real challenge is how to make money at this new game. We are exploring some innovative approaches. No one has the right answer yet. But we know that new models will emerge that will transfer a higher portion of the revenue directly to the creators (1/3 in our case). News writers feel very threatened as the sale of news papers decline rapidly. I don't think the news writers are at risk. There will always be demand for good reporting. What will disappear is the inefficient industry of printing, distributing and recycling millions of tons of paper daily when every thing can be instantly distributed for free on the internet. This is an industry that has lost its economic value.

Printing fewer books is better for the environment. We will see on-demand paper printing becoming the norm. Paper books will be eventually printed only when really needed and because of that they will be valued and cherished more. The team at Read an E-book week researched extensively the amount of paper and ink saved by not printing. The potential ecological benefits are enormous. This consciousness is now part of our culture, especially with young people.

The users will find new uses for the new technology. As texting spawned Twitter and novels written entirely on cell phones in Japan, e-books creators and readers will invent unanticipated uses for the technology. Children e-books offer new possibilities for illustrators. For example, the images are backlit rather than needing reflected light, this opens up new illustration techniques. For the new digital arts graduates e-books mean a very fast production cycle. As touch screen become the norm we expect a new generation of pop-up e-books to be created. At Sharing-Books we have extrapolated a number of future applications by examining how people use technology, yet we have already been surprised by our users. Jennifer Poulter, one of our book creators came up with the idea of a one page book - poster poems as teaching aids. Teachers from around the world love them.

I hope these comments help.

Labels: DRM, e-books, e-readers, gaming consoles, publishing