The Chameleon Net blog - Is the future of the book written in the iPad? ...spreading *Web Karma*

Chris Thorn: Is the future of the book written in the iPad?

Although the iPad is surely going to be a popular way to watch video, play games, surf the web etc., what I am really interested in is what it means for the future of the book.

eBook readers have been slowly been gaining ground, but with the iPad and iBooks store, eBooks take another leap forward. Although ebooks are available from multiple online retail points, Apple's major centralised ebooks store is the first to present a genuine challenge to Amazon. Five of the six major publishing houses - Penguin, Harper-Collins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette Book Group - have signed up to iBooks. Random House is the lone major yet to sign up. Also unlike Amazon, Apple has embraced the open ePub format, bringing an industry standard closer to fruition, which is bound to knock down another barrier to widespread adoption of using electronic devices to read books.

Therefore, there can be little doubt that over the next five to ten years, there will be a major shift in developed countries from the printed word to the electronically created word! More than this, Jobs says that the iPad can read colour photos and video. Therefore, the nature of books themselves could change, and the distinctions between media categories and formats blur; you can imagine a cooking eBook containing a video of the celebrity chef making the recipe along with a link to the chef’s website; or a gardening book containing a video of Alan Titchmarsh in action. Maybe new hybrid formats might appear in fiction as well softening the line between film, books and on-line resources.

But before I get too carried away, we will have to wait to see what the reading experience on the iPad is like. After all, the eBook movement has been underpinned by the development of non-backlight, high contract screens using technology like eInk, which is why products like the Barnes & Noble nook use two screens - one eInk screen for reading and a small LCD touchscreen for navigation.
So the jury is out, but whether the iPad is as hugely popular as the iPod and iPhone or not, one thing we know for sure is that the electronic “book” is here to stay and there is no going back!