Long time ago ALL music manufacturers got together and agreed on a wildly successful standard called MIDI. Crudely speaking MIDI is a standardized protocol which enables various devices to "talk" to each other: Now Roland drum nachine could send data to a Yamaha drum machine and be slaved to Kurzweil master controller.
Book industry needs to resolve this conflict and agree on the same document standard. So a book on Sony device can be easily read Kindle or Blackberry or laptop etc.
Standardized format digital distribution may result in the great ebook revival.

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@purplephase: i think i agree with just about everything you said, except i would point out that music became auditory-only with the mass adoption of gramaphones & radio, in the early 20th C ... prior to that, listening to music meant watching musicians playing... or playing yourself.

Regular books are easier on the eyes when reading for long periods and I can't see them being replaced anytime soon by E-books. I don't want to need an electrical source to read something. Not to mention that E-books, when they finally breakdown, just add to the toxic e-waste problem. You need to cut down a tree for a book, but books are also biodegradable. Or give or lend them to friends or donate them.

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@johnwcowan: funny, now that you mention it, i do recall reading about that... but the point is: libraries help publishers, they don't hurt them; and I think most publishers would agree with that now.

@mrsmisouri: the question is not so much what writers & publishers think about ebooks, but what readers think. whatever else publishing is, it's a consumer business with an objective of satisfying consumer demand. there are many many problems in publishing; digital does not answer all those problems, but it does provide cheap and easy distribution ... meaning small publishers should be able to level the playing field.

@magisterludi: maybe the big music biz is struggling, but indie music is thriving...whether or not we want this to happen to the book business is immaterial in my opinion, it's going to happen, so the best thing to do is figure out what a sensible model might be. (and i'm on board w/ cheap public domain books)

@blackjac: pynchon & his publisher can do what they like... but the question for the rest of us should be: where are the readers, and how do we get books to them? ...and not every tech catches on, true, but i'm betting that ebooks will, with the right kind of device.

Actually, publishers (and misguided authors) did struggle against free lending libraries quite a lot, though none of us are old enough to remember that personally.

As a reader since I was six and a professional writer for 20-some years, I'm not as jazzed about e-books/digital content. Surveys show the majority of children still prefer old-fashioned covers-and-pages books over reader-devices. Having been in the business for as long as I have, I seriously doubt the problems nagging publishers have anything to do with the "delivery system." Generally, there are simply too many books published (411,000+ titles last year) and too many trends chased en masse. Industry mergers and conglomerations have hugely increased the number of books published, undermined the quality and forced out any number of fine, highly skilled editors. In fact, much book production--from editing to printing--has been outsourced overseas Flooding the market in print or digital formats is not the answer. Sales aren't down across the board; sales per title often fail to sell in projected quantity to recoup production costs. Slice a pie 411,000 ways and the pieces become miniscule. Publishers' antiquated money-back return policy (begun during the Depression) is also a factor, but the financial float for publishers and chain booksellers is too lucrative to abolish, despite occasional murmurs to the contrary. My fondest hope is the economic downturn will bring de-conglomeration and publishers will again be in the book business, not the blockbuster-centric product. business.

What this blog really address is the distribution side of the business.
Performance, production and royalties keeps e radically different in music buz. Without performance and performance royalties music business would cease to exist. In Asia music business is R.I.P due to digital distribution and piracy. In U.S. the record stores, the crucial market place of musical ideas is gone. Even big name bands now support themselves primarily by touring. Macca has been reduced to hawking CDs at Starbucks for lack of better distribution.
Do we want this to happen in the book business?

Here's a novel solution for increasing business-- all public domain titles-- $5 paperback, $8 hardback. Example: B& N sells Thomas Paine: Collected Writings hardback for $28. I wonder if ole Tom got any of this money.

I would add a sixth piece of advice: it's all about the content!! Both Amazon and Sony have done a decent job of adding new releases in the past year, yet both are still badly lagging on older content. Where is the Updike, the Pynchon, the McGuane, the William Kennedy, the Wallace Stegner? Why can't I buy Edward Abbey or Hunter S. Thompson?

I would echo a couple of points made in the post: Give us DRM-free content. If I own a Sony and want to switch over to a Kindle or an Iliad I should be able to convert my books hassle-free. And quit gouging us on price. If you profitably sell a paper book for $20, the ebook can be profitably sold at $8.

Over a year ago I was flying home from LA and managed to lose a paperback book I had brought with me by having it fall out of my carry-on somehow. That following Saturday I just went to Barnes & Noble and bought a new copy of it for $7.

Long before that I'd spent time as the maitre d' at a Verizon Wireless store. I lost count of the number of times people who'd decided to forgo a hardline altogether came in saying they'd lost their cellphones either by leaving it on top of the car or in the cab or dropped it in the toilet or river and were conseqeuently incommunicado until they shelled out a fresh $200 or so for a new phone...assuming they hadn't gotten a cellphone insurance policy to reduce that replacement cost to $50. And don't get me started on line-of-sight transmission issues and how hands-free cellphone stuff had already existed back in the '90s when cellphones had green backlighting.

Not every technological advancement catches on.