Richard Nantel

I recently had a chance to speak to representatives of HarperCollins, Random House, and other publishing firms and was surprised to see how much energy and resources these companies are currently allocating to e-books. Publishers report that sales for eBooks never lived up to expectations since their launch in the mid to late 1990s. But, they all feel this is about to change. Consequently, these companies are now feverishly converting current publications as well as a significant amount of their back lists into e-book format.

There are a few reasons for their optimism:

• A few months ago, Sony launched a new e-book delivery device called the Sony Reader that’s creating quite a bit of buzz. Sony must feel optimistic about e-books to have invested substantial R&D dollars to bring a new reader to market.

• The über retailer, Amazon, is purported to be preparing to make e-books available through its online store. Publishers report that one of the main obstacles that has inhibited the growth of e-books is the lack of a major retailer.

• Small mobile devices such as cell phones, iPods and other audio players, personal digital assistants (PDAs), etc. are now ubiquitous, providing potential delivery platforms for e-books.

• A new non-proprietary file format (OCF, also known as epubs) has just been developed and is in many ways superior to past formats. One of the main advantages of this format is that it dynamically optimizes the display of the content to best fit the device.

The popularity of iPods and other audio devices has led to growing adoption of podcasting as a delivery format for learning content. If the big publishing houses are right and e-books take off this time around, e-book content may soon be a big part of most organizations’ learning strategies.