As I am writing these words I am mindful of a fanciful Arab proverb which says “Those who foretell the future lie, even if they tell the truth”. I guess, in a way, the proverb is right. The future is always so fluid and so uncertain that it can only be read truthfully in retrospect.

Take the case of eBooks for example. Touted as the saviour of the publishing industry and the democratising force in publishing, in equal measures, they have been used to call the death-knell for paper books so many times before that now, when it happens, hardly anyone bothers to listen. Yet eBooks are, despite the odds, beginning to make headway in publishing. More and more people choose to read one on Amazon’s Kindle, their smartphones or PDAs. The shrinking circulation of newspapers is promoting alternative, wireless, mobile delivery platforms as the format of choice and the inexorable march of technology appears to add its own pressures to the narrowing down of time. The arrival of the moment when eBooks will be the only viable route to publishing and publication.

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When it comes to eBooks Amazon is the industry weather vane. Its ability to tie up supply with demand in a vertical delivery model, and its high profile involvement in bringing its own eBook reader in the market, called Kindle, have always created favorable comparisons with Apple’s iTunes model.

The belief was that by copying the Apple model Amazon could become the de facto supremo in providing viable eBook devices to a growing market and benefit, in the process, through its ability to concentrate in one place an eBook collection which is over a quarter of a million books strong.

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The iPod model showed convincingly that technology, when properly thought out and positioned with the end-user in mind will always provide a new way of doing old things. Music and even video and DVD downloads have made the CD history and have killed-off blue-ray disks before they even had much of a chance to breathe. Today we listen to MP3 tunes on smartphones which are smaller than a cigarette pack used to be and pack more computing power than the first Apple Mac, we have MP3 players which can hold over 1,000 tunes and look little bigger than a boy scout merit badge and we receive full business office connectivity on devices which fit in the palm of our hand.

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At first glance the question of whether the writing in an eBook or a paper book is different may appear oxymoronic but this is far from it being so. If we take a step back into the past and look at the world of ancient Greece with its marble tablets and muscle power (not to mention precision) required to carve out a simple announcement or inscription we can surmise that the margin for spelling mistakes in those days was pretty narrow and that leafleting and Newsletter publishing were options which were simply not feasible.

The point is that the binding is an inescapable part of the manuscript and it affects everything from the way the text is presented (and its attending message) to the way it is accessed. Digital is, for lack of a better description, a different form of binding and as such it affects the writing and presentation.

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The web was the first place ever to justify the notion of the ‘free lunch’ making, in its early days, a massive amount of information, programming and experience available for free to a community which was energised, inspired and bound together by the common ideal of a world without borders.

We have moved on since to understand that there is a value (and a cost) in every service and websites which give away FREE ebooks do so for a reason. Maybe they capture your details for later marketing, maybe the eBook they promote is one that is part of their viral marketing and maybe they are establishing themselves as market leaders in which case giving away a certain amount of information artfully presented in a professionally created eBook format, makes perfect sense. It is, after all, paid for by their advertising budget and it helps promote their brand and bring in extra clients to their website.

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A well-written, edited and presented eBook on your website can add credibility, become a channel for more sales and, if you handle it properly, give you an additional passive income stream that will continue to give you money for as long as the eBook you are selling continues to provide value to your online visitors.

The question here is what exactly constitutes an eBook that’s of true value. It is easier, at this stage, to explain what is not an eBook. A Word formatted file that’s converted to PDF is not an eBook any more than any hastily written, unedited text that’s thrown together and turned into a PDF file.

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