Sean D'Souza: Ready yourself for the triumph of the e-book

On December 25, 2009, something quite remarkable happened at Amazon.com. For the first time in Amazon's history, sales of e-books overtook physical books. And on that day the paper book downslide officially began. The Kindle put some early nails in the coffin. What the Kindle didn't complete, Apple's iPad (and other book readers) will be sure to finish off.

But surely books won't die?
The death of books has been exaggerated before and hey, they're still around. Surely books aren't going to die in a hurry.

Books won't die; the paper book will die.
Less than 10 years ago it wasn't uncommon to load your car with dozens of CDs as you went on a trip. It wasn't uncommon to have a stack of CDs in your lounge. Where are those CDs now? They're all nicely ripped and sitting in your iPod, iPhone or at the very least on your computer. Only a dinosaur carries CDs around these days.

That dinosaur story applies to books.
So you're headed on vacation, and you pick up a few books to read. You want to bone up on a specific topic? Again, you pick up a few books from the store or from the library. In a few years, that idea of lugging around books will seem quaint.

Why would you want to have dozens of books stacked around taking up space, when you can have them all on your Kindle or your iPad? Sounds too sci-fi? Well the librarians don't think so. Across the planet, libraries have latched on to digital media. One of the early libraries to lend out Kindles and Sony Readers was North Carolina State University Library. And the list of libraries giving out Kindles, Sony Readers and e-book readers continues to grow.

If this revolution seems unreal, just wait until devices like the iPad catch on.
Kindles set out to allow you to download books or newspapers from anywhere. That meant you could read the New York Times or just about any book in the Kindle store without having any access to a wireless hotspot or internet connection. But to keep this download small, all the fancy colour and graphics were stripped out of the Kindle display. This meant that you were largely restricted to text in black and white.

Apple's iPad has no such restriction.
If you choose you can simply download the Kindle app onto your iPad and read a book (in a nice big font and size). If you choose, you may be able to download the book in full colour (yes, publishers are already queuing up to have their books on the iPad).

As if that were not dramatic enough, you'll be able to do it wirelesslythrough a choice of 3G or indeed over your wireless hotspot.

Digital books have existed for a while, but there's always been a problem.

You could indeed take your PDF and try and read on a flight. Or you could download a magazine from Zinio.com and read it in bed.

But you always had to contend with a laptop at the very least. And I don't know about you, but a computer doesn't exactly come close to the happiness you get when reading a book.

On a Kindle or iPad that frustration goes away. Now, instead of lugging a computer to bed, I can prop up my iPad and voila - I have the very same, if not an enhanced experience.

Enhanced? How could it be enhanced?
Already you can bookmark pages on a Kindle. That should be standard on a tablet device of the future. Underlining, scribbling on the book, doodling etc, is just a matter of time.

But that's just the reading experience. What really kills the paper book is the storage experience.

I can now store whatever I want in a tiny little device. And find the darned thing when I want to find it.

Most of us who are sentimental about paper and books will resist even the thought of the "death" of paper books. This column isn't for the sentimentalists. It's about how it will affect your business.

If you're an author, or if your company puts out documentation, it's a matter of time before you will need to put your information in an e-publishing format.

And no, that's not PDF, though PDF may well do for the short term.

You may be so in love with the paper book that you see information like this as overly sensational.

And again you're missing the point. The point is simply this:

* Your business needs to understand the e-book format.

* It needs to be ready to publish in the ePub format.

* It may well turn out that you can continue to print a paper book as a collector's item or a special bonus, but the paper book will simply become unfeasible in the long run no matter how sentimental you feel about it.

The paper book will fade away.

Film in cameras faded away. CDs faded away. Horses and carts faded away. And the paper book will have its own ride into the sunset - still around, but niche and largely marginalised.

You may not agree with this assessment. But you have little choice in how history unfolds.

And Christmas Day of 2009 changed history forever.

Sean D'Souza is chief executive of Psychotactics and an international author and trainer. He is the author of The Brain Audit - Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don't).

www.psychotactics.com