There's nothing like hindsight for making the most authoritative soothsayer look like an idiot. Predictions made at the beginning of the 1990s about the imminent displacement of the book by the e-book have gone the way of prophecies about the colonisation of Mars. The truth is that the book is an extremely well-designed tool. In other words, if it ain't broken . . .
But while it may not be steamrolling the paper book into obsolescence, neither has the e-book given up the ghost. Now the big boys are starting to get involved. Publishing giants Random House and Time Warner have both set up digital imprints, while book selling conglomerate Barnes and Noble has invested $20 million in MightyWords, a site where authors can sell directly to their readers.
The most recent spate of prophecies continue to envisage a rosy future for the e-book. Andersen Consulting have issued a report which predicts that e-book sales will make up 10 per cent of the US book market in 2005. In the same year, Internet forecaster Forrester believes that electronic media will account for 17.5 per cent of publishing revenues. And the Electronic Document Systems Foundation has stuck its head well above the parapet, predicting the extinction of the paperback by 2020.
But digital publishing has yet to sort out a few things. First of all, some order is going to have to be imposed on the chaos that currently characterises it. There is no centralised Internet database for finding a digitised book; you have to wander between portals to search for a title that probably isn't available.
A more serious impediment to the growth of the sector is the proliferation of publishing formats. There's Adobe PDF, Microsoft Reader, Rocket eBook and Glassbook, to name just four. An industry-wide Open eBook Forum continues to address the issue without a great deal of success. Then there's screen resolution. Anything below 300 dots per inch will be more difficult to read than ink on paper, and screens with that kind of resolution are currently outside the reach of consumer electronics.
But even if the industry were to overcome these obstacles, a far more fundamental problem would remain. People love books. We collect them and scribble on them and fill shelves with them. We derive enormous pleasure from much more than just the information contained between the covers of a book. And we borrow and lend them, which brings up the major bugbear of all digital media: copyright protection.
But e-books do have distinct advantages over paper books. Anyone who's ever spent a fruitless half hour searching for a quote will know how difficult it is to mine paper books for information. E-Books also beget instant gratification. You want the book, you get on the net, find it and download it.
Also worth noting is that censorship becomes far more difficult with e-books, though whether this belongs in the pros or the cons column is endlessly debatable. What's sure is that salacious e-books don't burn half as well as their more primitive ancestors.