ebooks - the ‘ashtray on a motorbike’ phenomena a market might want

Can you spot the ebook above?

Without descending into a diatribe about McLuhan and co, I believe ebooks as a format and indeed art form are currently utterly immature. Fundamentally this is because the majority of those currently connected with their potential production cannot envisage/understand any viable business models for mass consumption more complicated than a ‘print book to electronic screen’.

Each of these non innovators sit waiting on the other to light the market up and speculate on innovation – the only dull spark to date being kindle. So in a similar context to what happen to TV innovation for fifty years, i.e. we simply got ‘stage’ on screen, ebooks currently lack their own dynamic properties. Apart from mobility, not needing to purchase an additional nightlight and incorporated navigation aids, ebooks in their current form are merely electronic versions of static print. The hardware standards agreement of late 2007 just ring fenced the current hardware players in an industry that doesn’t as yet know what it produces.

So apart form the low cost distributive ease of the ebook, there is little reason to believe that readers or consumers or anyone else for that matter, will actually want something even the potential seller doesn’t understand.