It was not so long ago — well, 2000, actually — that the age of ebooks ascended upon us, an era that would, as the AAP and Andersen Consulting then dreamily proclaimed, be “a significant opportunity” for the book biz, devouring almost 10% of the total consumer publishing market by 2005 and bloating into “total projected retail sales of $2.3 billion for the trade publishing industry.” Remember RocketeBook battling Softbook, and Palm menacing Microsoft to dominate the world of onscreen reading? By 2001, of course, expectations had been brutally downsized, and last week might have seemed like the nail in the coffin, as Reuters announced that Gemstar would try to dump its ebook business, including RocketeBook and Softbook, under the feeble proviso that a sale would occur “if a buyer emerged.”
Ding-dong, ebooks are dead. So why are 350 hype-weary publishing types scrambling to attend a sold-out conference on December 5 hosted by The Open eBook Forum?
Behold the Tablet PC. Unveiled by Microsoft on November 7, the new gizmo weighs about 3 pounds and allows the user to write on it with a stylus, or read from it, thanks to an onboard copy of Microsoft Reader. Chairman Bill Gates has already boasted that within five years (the timespan of choice for futurists) “it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.” But will early adopters shell out $2,499.99 to read on it? For his part, Chris North, VP and General Manager of Electronic Publishing at HarperCollins (and a speaker at Open eBook’s “Tablet PC Digital Publishing Conference”), volunteers that the tablet is “pretty cool.” “Reading trade books is not one of the primary purposes” in buying a tablet, he adds, but he thinks that, just as Palm Pilot users began downloading ebooks onto their devices, so will tablet owners. But this time, cautions North, publishers who survived the “extremes of over-enthusiasm and despair” will greet the new opportunity with “more realistic” expectations.
Still, they have expectations, and that’s attracted paying customers (with some seats advertised at $129 a pop) to one of the first industry conferences in a year or more. In addition, the lineup of sponsors, including AOL Time Warner, NYU Center for Publishing, and McGraw-Hill (along with the Adobes, Fujitsus, and Microsofts of the planet), suggests that all of those files weren’t digitized for naught. Most impressively, perhaps, the conference embraces not just book publishing, but newspaper and magazine publishing, making it one of the first conferences in which every medium of consumer publisher will participate.
Indeed, for those on the magazine side, the Tablet PC is a ray of hope. “The tablet introduces a whole new ballgame,” says Dan Schwartz, President and CEO of digital newsstand Qmags (also known as Qiosk). “That’s the excitement for us and the ebook space.” Qmags.com, now offering electronic delivery of eight magazine titles, including Popular Mechanics and The American Lawyer, has been plying a space also inhabited by Zinio.com (peddling e-versions of 20 magazines, such as Business Week and National Geographic Traveler), and NewsStand.com (with about 30 periodicals). Schwartz thinks the big draw is digital delivery, not onscreen reading. “There are people who read onscreen, but we think they’re a minority,” he says. Still, with the Tablet PC’s light weight and improved display, reading on your PC is easier than it’s ever been. The real trick is tapping into a revenue stream, and by Schwartz’s lights, online books may well become more like online magazines — delivered as serialized books, or even sponsored books — because the advertiser-based model simply offers more avenues for cash. “We’re really still very much at the frontier,” he adds. “It’s the frontier of the frontier.”
