Here’s an everyday scenario. You meet a new business acquaintance you think you can work in future with. You break the ice, tentatively check what he does, explain what you do and you part company after handing out your business card.

We are so used to reading eBooks and website content online we often forget that the words we read have a power all of their own and it is platform independent.

Becoming an eBook publisher, even in this day and age of outsourced web design services, requires a sizeable investment. For a start you need a website, some means of promoting it, an SEO team, banner advertising, good quality graphics and some means of controlling your website (like a CMS).

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.

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.