This article caught my eye because about 20 years ago I wrote an English paper telling a very similar story as to why people would be unlikely to fully embrace electronic books. Nothing beats the printed word.
Bubble Bursts for E-Books
Fri Oct 10,11:50 AM ET
By Paul Majendie
FRANKFURT, Germany (Reuters) - At the height of the Internet boom, e-books were hailed as the shining new tomorrow for publishers and paper books were heading for the scrap heap.
But the bubble has burst and electronic books are still the poor relation to the printed word with consumers preferring to turn the pages themselves when they curl up by the fire with a good book.
"The limitless euphoria of the beginning belongs to the past," said Arnoud de Kemp, a leading electronic publisher with the science and business media firm Springer.
Three years after the e-book frenzy reached its peak, publishers in Frankfurt for the world's biggest book fair of the year were in a much more realistic frame of mind.
Last month, top U.S. bookseller Barnes & Noble Inc announced it was halting e-book sales. "We did not see sales take off as we and many others had anticipated," a spokesman said.
Targets have been sharply lowered and now publishers look on e-books as a much smaller market which does still, admittedly from a very low starting point, see steady growth.
"Expectations were widely overblown at the time of the Internet bubble," said British publisher Helen Fraser, managing director at Penguin.
"But there is a small market for them and it may grow as different reading devices appear on the market. Sales do go up month by month," she told Reuters.
She said if Penguin sold 40,000 copies of a printed book, it would typically shift 4,000 audio books of the same title and 400 e-books.
In the technological battle to find the perfect way to read electronic books on your palm-top or personal computer, competing formats have put the consumer off.
David Steinberg, president of corporate strategy and international in New York with HarperCollins, said: "There was a format war. They compete and are not compatible. That creates resistance."
"Three years ago, there was a huge amount of hype but we did not get caught up in it. We steered away from digitizing all our works and dumping them into cyberspace," he told Reuters.
He said e-books, still a tiny part of the overall business, have a "30 percent plus" annual growth rate with HarperCollins putting out the complete works of thriller writer Agatha Christie electronically.
But the reader's love affair with the printed word is far from over because, as Chris Barnard, technology analyst at IDC consultancy, concluded, "One problem is that e-books are up against a very established technology, namely books. And most people are very happy with that technology."
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