This is a tale that begins back in 1999 when eBooks first made a brave and, as it turns out, premature appearance and then set about doing a roller-coaster ride of high expectations and dashed hopes as they failed to take off. Like so many things yesteryear’s failure (or last century’s in this case) is the success tale of today and eBooks are no exception.

No one attending the CES 2010 showcase in Las Vegas last week will have failed to get the message. With eBook readers coming out of the woodwork (Sony, Amazon Kindle, Samsung E6 and E1010, Cybook Opus, Sony eBook Reader in various flavors) paper publishing seems destined to join the scrapheap of history alongside the clay tablet and the papyrus scroll and eBooks are on the way in. Before you start to rub your hands with glee and rush to brush up on your “I told you so and thanks for all the fish” speeches let’s take a mo to examine just what this means for those of you who have a cool eBook idea and those who still see paper publishing as the only viable route to published author credibility.

First, yes, eBooks are here to stay. Partly the ecology which is going into global meltdown and partly the economy, which is going into global meltdown, have convinced publishers that the only viable route to success is to be able to deliver 1s and 0s directly to the masses through a wide variety of digital access routes which currently range from PDAs and smartphones (at WDS we read eBooks are lunchtime on our Blackberrys) to dedicated eBook readers (we love the Sony) and tablet PCs (Apple is about to bring out an eBook tablet which will be full colour).

Along the way they have struggled with costs (eBooks are not much cheaper than paper books) copyright protection (DRM or not? The question is still to be resolved), vertical delivery channels, quality control, visual presentation and the perennial question of how to dovetail eBooks (a new product) in their traditional paper book publishing model.

Most of the answers to these questions have been given by start-ups which have embraced the technology and offered eBook publishing as a means rather than an end. The new technology is here to stay and 2010 is the decade of the eBook but that does not mean that paper will simply die. Publishing is going digital with a vengeance and those who will win big are the ones who are able to take advantage of the cost gains of digital technology and offer both eBooks and paper books running off the same digital development curve, which, in the latter case, means point-of-sale fulfilment and Print-On-Demand (POD) publishing.

The Publishing model for the next 10 years
We are wary of making predictions of course but the way things are shaping up if you want your published work to be read by the masses today, if you need to increase your visibility as a professional and get some credibility as a published author you then have the exact same routes available to you as an individual as any author working with an established publishing house, and you have a lot more control on how your work is created, presented and marketed.

This means that you can now get your work to the online public through a digital publishing account which will put your eBook on sale through every major online eBook retailer (including the Amazon Kindle Store) and you can choose to also make your book available to buy as a paper copy using the exact same book supply fulfilment channels used by major publishing houses.

Self-published works is the next natural step in the democratization of the web which empowers individuals to present their work and lets their audience decide if it’s good enough or not to rise above the crowd or be lost in the masses.

As always the ingredients for success are not the how but the what. It’s not enough to figure out how your book will be published but what it needs to be about, who will read it (and why) and how you can best format it to give the reader the best value possible for their money and time. Paper books, for example, are still spine-value driven and ‘dumb’ in the way they present information. eBooks, however, can increase the value of their content by several degrees, totally differentiating themselves from paper through increased used of rich-media and reader-led interactions which create a much more immersive environment.

While the publishers’ figures suggest that the book-reading public is shrinking more of us spend more time reading than ever before. We read the content of websites, we read digital reports, we read eBooks and we read emails at a rate which just three years ago would have been unheard of. This suggests that it is publishers who are failing to ‘get it’ rather than the public doing less reading.

A potent eBook, like SEO Help, for instance, offering targeted, practical advice can shift more copies in 24 hours than publishers could comfortably deliver to bookshops in a week. This also defines the recipe of successful publishing today. Whether you go for a purely online model or one which is paper-based, or even a combination of the two, the underlying platform for both will be digital. What you need to do is make sure your formatting is appropriate for each one. You have something of value to say and you say it in a way which is accessible and designed to provide something new.

The Web Direct Studio company Blog is penned by a number of our in-house staff from our different areas of activity. They write anonymously in order to free their range of expression, particularly when it comes to criticizing their sector of activity or making observations about their job. They work under a simple edict: What you say must make sense and must fit in with the tone of our online business. Apart from that they are the ones who choose the topic they write about in each Blog post.