Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

For ages now I’ve been reading about the promise of electronic books: “You’ll carry a library in your pocket! You’ll read everywhere!” In some cases, instead of the promise it’s the peril that comes to the fore: “Authors will suffer! Publishers will go out of business! And you can’t write in the margins of an e-book! And what about the glare?!”

I think Gutenberg can rest easy in his grave: given that the world welcomes more copies of more new titles — bound, on paper, the old-fashioned way — every year, it hardly seems that movable type has run its course. But hey, you know, it would be cool, if you were sitting on a plane or waiting at the doctor’s office, to have a bunch of books on a device that would fit in your pocket. Kind of like an iPod lets you–

HarperCollins is way ahead of me. The News Corporation unit has announced that it will make parts of some of its fall releases available for the Apple iPhone. Well, actually, Harper isn’t that far ahead of me, because their arrangement doesn’t go nearly far enough, since it’s really just an extension of an existing program (albeit a fairly large one) to give potential book-buyers the chance to browse short sections of Harper titles before placing an order for . . . the old-fashioned, printed-on-paper version of the book. Here’s the relevant bit from the Reuters story linked above:

iPhone subscribers will be able to view the first 10 pages of chapters one and two of the select group of new books in what HarperCollins described as a pilot program.

After sampling the stories, customers can choose to buy or pre-order the book from retailers through the mobile application.

One of these days, Harper or some other publishing house is going to crack this nut. They’re going to figure out — or take a risk to try figuring out — just how many books they can move in electronic format. It’s much likelier to happen on a popular device like the iPhone than on an expensive, standalone e-book reader. The publisher who figures this out will have an audience of commuters, air-travelers, bored people in waiting rooms, and so on who already have the right piece of technology in their pockets, and who only need to be convinced to pay a reduced price for the layout and words of a book without the paper and cardboard trappings. Who knows what that rate will be, but there are some smart folks out there who can work out the pricing, I’m sure.

But until the publishers get their act together, we wait for a pervasive method of e-book delivery. Sure, you can get books downloaded to your cell phone. But given the tiny window on my cell phone and the even tinier print that fills it, that’s not the Holy-Grail delivery device the e-book world is looking for. The iPhone — or whatever comes next after the iPhone — could be.