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READ A GOOD E-BOOK LATELY?
The promise of the e-book has always been just that: a promise. Until now.

Text: DON TAPSCOTT

AUG 03

Long after they first appeared on the scene, the promise of e-books still tantalizes: lightweight pocketbook-size devices with crystal clear screens and enough storage for 100 magazines and books. Novels, short stories, journals, newspapers, textbooks – you can download them all and save both trees and money in the process.

"To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul," said Cicero. Great. Now my briefcase can have a soul too.

The raison d'être of e-books goes far beyond simply mimicking books and magazines. E-books will become a new genre of interactive communication. To get a sense of how tomorrow's e-books will function, visit a good newspaper or magazine Website, where on-line stories bristle with hyperlinks to other information: different stories on the same issue, original documents referred to in the story (such as a news release or the full text of a speech), Internet links, definitions of terms, other stories by the same writer and so on.

Web-savvy newspapers use multimedia Websites to enrich stories beyond newsprint's capabilities. During the Iraq war, big American newspapers supplemented their coverage with on-line features such as animated graphics showing troop movements and illustrating how different weapons work, or photographic slide shows of combat, often with audio commentary from a reporter.

That's how e-books will perform since they'll be connected constantly to the Internet through soon-to-be-ubiquitous Wi-Fi networks in home, office and public "hot spots." This is the biggest piece of the technology puzzle that has been missing so far and one reason e-books aren't more common today. (Limited battery life is the other big problem.)

But once the technology improves, e-books will explode in popularity. You'll be able to do neat tricks, such as clicking on a word to see it defined and hear it pronounced. (All e-books will have speakers.) And because your device will be on-line, there will be no need to build this information into the text of the book. Instead, your e-book will consult one of the many dictionary Websites, retrieve the definition and audio files and play them back. It's just like reading a regular book with a dictionary at your elbow, except the e-book streamlines the process.

Voice, music, and still and moving images can all be integrated into the narrative. Instead of reading a book, we might listen to a narrator and view photographs on the screen, in much the same way we watched Ken Burns' hugely popular documentaries on PBS about the American Civil War and baseball.

All these features not only make for a great entertainment device but also a powerful information and knowledge-sharing tool. That's why e-book-type products are already making inroads into the health and education fields. Doctors love the medical encyclopedias they can carry in a Palm or Pocket PC. Add wireless capabilites, and they can tap into medical databases around the world while they are still bedside instead of having to go back to the office to look up unfamiliar symptoms.

Rather than forcing students to buy 20-kilo stacks of books, universities could strike deals with publishers to let students download the relevant chapters and articles onto their laptops or Tablet PCs. Freed from the constraints of the printing press, publishers would be able to develop richer multimedia material for students, again linking to on-line resources.

E-books won't replace everything. The spy-thriller and romance paperbacks you took with you to the cottage this summer will be with us for a long time to come. They're great value: cheap, portable and familiar. And paperbacks make a lot more sense in some environments than in others. Good luck trying to read any of today's e-books on the beach. You'd have to huddle under a beach towel to block the sun and make sure the sand didn't gum up the works.

Finally, all of us will have favourite publications that we won't want annotated and hyperlinked. I'll prefer to keep my E.E. Cummings and Hemingway in their original formats. But an English student might love a digitized novel by Papa Hemingway, with critical commentary, interviews and photographs of the author on safari, just as we've come to expect such bonus material on DVDs.

Soon we'll see multimedia combo packs. Read the book, listen to an interview with the author, then turn the screen sideways and watch the movie. Perfect for those overseas flights. [ ]

Don Tapscott's new book, The Naked Corporation (with co-author David Ticoll), will be available in September 2003 in both paper and e-book form.

ADD YOUR COMMENTS > dtapscott@enroutemag.net

AUG 03