A July 15th article, written by Jack Shafer, which can be found at Slate.com, asks if the book industry wants to get “Napstered”, by which is meant: do publishers who are fighting with Amazon about their $9.99 e-book prices (which they think are too low) want to make it so difficult and expensive for readers to purchase copies of e-books on line at reasonable prices that they will resort to bootlegged versions, as happened in the music industry?

There is no doubt that publishers are not facing up to the economic realities and perceived value of e-books to purchasers. Amazon.com sells most e-books for $9.99 and has thereby set a standard, and it is a standard that readers seem willing to live with. Free, of course, is much cheaper, and there are bootlegged copies of books available on the Internet just for the searching. But at $9.99 most readers are content to pay for the convenience of delivery and ease of downloading onto one of the currently acceptable readers.While they only constitute about 1 or 2 percent of all books sold, much attention seems to be paid to e-books and e-readers. Barnes & Noble recently announced they are opening an e-book store to go head to head with Amazon.com. The notion of competition is good, but Barnes & Noble seems to be adopting the Amazon price without making their e-books available on either of the two most popular e-reader devices. Their e-books can only be downloaded on i-Phones, Blackberries, and computers. Making purchasing e-books more cumbersome does not bode well for the success of this venture or for e-books in general.

Nevertheless Shafer concludes, in his article, that we are on the edge of the technological explosion that will greatly improve the quality of e-readers – think i-pad. Most experts believe eventually Apple will do for books what they did for music with the i-phone, in which case, the purchase of e-books will escalate enormously. Even now during the last six months, Amazon.com has reported the growth of the percentage of e-books of all books available on their site in e-book format from 17 percent to 35 percent.If we are on the verge of such amazing growth in e-books, publishers and authors should start preparing for the way in which e-books can evolve and offer aspects of their very nature that will set them apart from printed books. I have touched upon this subject in other posts, and I don’t think there is enough thought and discussion given to how authors can creatively add purpose and value to their works once they do not have to think of them as printed books but vehicles for content.Some of the ways might be to create books that can be released in serialization, or books that contain chapters or parts that stand-alone and can thus be purchased in sections. Other obvious ideas are adding components that would be too expensive to include in print editions, such as audio tracks, photographs, art work, video clips, extended notes, original source material, and study questions and answers. The sky is the limit, and it will be up to authors and publishers to focus attention on how they want e-books to evolve to meet the needs of an ever-changing marketplace.