E-Ink leaves its mark

The scenario

Introduction

The “E-Ink leaves its mark”-scenario focuses on the rise of ebooks and ebook-readers and the downfall of the traditional paper books. The major advantages ebooks bring with them will make them a success in almost every possible part of the book-market as we know it, leaving paper books to a mere niche market of collectors and nostalgists.

Advantages of ebooks and current ebook-readers (current & short-term view)

Kindle-like devices will flood the market in the near-future, each bringing new features and slight advantages over the previous generation. Main focus of the new devices will be the weight, thickness, battery-life and screen technology. The new features on the devices will include mp3-playback capability, web-browsers.

With the new products, new standards will follow and various companies will choose various file-standards. As the readers are often capable of using multiple file-formats there will be no apparent winner.

Alongside the different products will come different stores and sales-models where users will be able to buy their books, but also can subscribe to magazines, newspapers, blogs, etc. which will automatically download to their devices as they become available. Also, using these stores, authors will be able to sell their books without intervention of a publisher. They will often share in the revenue of the sales of their books or get paid through a comparable system.

Users will embrace the ebook stores for being available anyplace, anytime, and for offering an enormous amount of books at competitive prices. Many classic books are available for free, as they are in the public domain, and with the gutenberg project and other alternatives, this collection will only grow.

Students as early adopters (short & medium-term view)

As ebook-readers evolve and more books are being published in ebook format, more people will switch from paper books to ebooks and ‘brick and mortar’-stores will struggle to survive in a market of declining sales after already having lost a lot of market share to the online stores.

A major step in the adoption of ebooks are students. Universities will start programs where students will be able to buy ebook-readers and be able to buy all necessary study books through an online store. As this can be done for large groups of students at the same time, the students will be able to buy the reader and books at low prices. With the advantages of easy bookmarking, searching through text quickly and jumping to pages directly from the index, the ebooks will bring nice advantages to the students.

Universities will also start to set up systems for the students through which they can obtain study material like presentations and papers of presenters directly on the reader, making it an all-in-one device for looking up all sorts of information.

Students will get fully used to using the devices, lowering the threshold for them to buy non-study books in online stores and using the device for more than just studying. All while being at university, they will hardly touched any paper books as all the necessary study material is available on the reader and they will even read their regular books on the device.

As more students will graduate having used the ebook readers for longer periods of time, they are more likely to keep using similar devices and give up on paper books as a whole.

With the introduction of the aforementioned programs by universities the paper study book market will essentially disappear. As more students graduate and switch to ebook readers the market for regular paper books will also start to notice the effects and start losing market share to the ebook market.

As a side-effect to all this, another market of books is also influenced. With increasing technology, text-to-speech technology will also evolve and ebooks can be ‘read’ to the listener by the ebook reader, virtually destroying the market for audiobooks, as each ebook will be an audiobook by default.

Ebook-readers evolve (long-term view)

With technology evolving at the same pace as it has in the last couple of years, ebook readers will become thinner and lighter than ever before. Flexible displays will become the new standard and battery times will be measured in weeks instead of hours or days. The new ebook reader will look like a thick piece of paper, which can be rolled up to a small package with a small block of plastic for the necessary connectors and electronics. Controls will go through motion and the touch-sensitive surface.

With the extremely small size and high battery life, everybody will be able to take along their entire book collection in their pockets. With the high refresh rates and color screens, the ebook reader will be able to display full color websites and pictures and even play some movie-material.

Along with the new technology, comes lower prices. With different types of products with varying features to accommodate all wishes of different users, everybody will be able to buy an ebook-reader that suits him or her best at an affordable price.

Now that the ebook readers have become common good and virtually every disadvantage has been overcome through new technologies, there is nothing to hold back the ebooks from becoming the biggest player in the market. The paper book market can now be considered as a niche market, as paper books will mostly be bought by nostalgists and collectors.

DRM & Piracy (possible issues to overcome)

DRM on ebooks will be common good for the first couple of years. As the ebook readers evolve and different online stores come and go, different file formats will appear and disappear, each having their own DRM protection. With people switching devices and shops after a certain amount of time, the call for DRM-less ebooks will grow louder. Authors will be reluctant to make this move at first, but quickly come to the conclusion that removing DRM doesn’t only have downsides. Piracy on ebooks will always exist, and with the popularity of ebooks increasing, so will piracy on ebooks. Removing DRM will make it easier to copy and spread ebooks, but those ebooks would eventually be spread anyways.

With piracy growing, more people will be able to come in contact with the books of certain authors which they previously would not have found or stayed away from as they didn’t want to spend money on books from an author they didn’t know. These changes will lead to a similar evolvement as with music where artists gradually came to see that DRM was not the solution and eventually gave up on it.

Background Information

Introduction

This scenario is based on the cumulated effects of several forces. The following discussion is presented from the year 2020 perspective, providing information about what happened since 2009 that lead to the extinction of paper book industry and development of e-book industry.

Global warming

One of the most important factors that will lead to this scenario are environmental issues. The environment is of big importance as it represents the supplier of resources needed for paper books to be printed. Global warming is a current problem that affects the environment and will have a major impact on our society.

Trees

In year 2020 the carbon dioxide in the environment has reached even higher levels with an increase of 15% compared to 2008. This increase has been responsible for the death of 10% of the worldwide tree amount over a timespan of 10 years. Moreover, global warming had increased the number and the intensity of forest fires so much that fire fighting techniques are not sufficient anymore to extinguish them. Forests have become smaller and smaller which caused governments to enact laws against logging. The trees planted to improve the situation had no major effect as the number of trees that died was much bigger than those planted.

As trees are needed to support life, their purpose as wood supply for printing books has been pushed to the background, greatly fueling the development of e-books.

Water

Global warming raised another issue: earth's fresh water resources. For years countries have recycled water but now the problem has become so serious that the water is supplied to people based on rations. Due to some innovations in industry that use water, the waste of water has been reduced, but as the global warming is generating lakes and rivers to dry up, the water is being provided only as a necessity for human consumption.

The book industry was forced to find new ways of providing books to their customers, ways that did not involve the use of water, and eventually companies had to resolve to e-books.

Oil becomes scarce

Transportation

Around 2015 the oil issue has the first major impact on the book industry. The distribution of paper books involves such high air transportation expenses that companies, in order to recover these expenses, have to rise the price of book so much that they become a luxury. Customers start to resolve to e-books as they are distributed instantly and for much lower prices.

Ink availability

Because the oil has been provided in limited amounts since 2012, depending on the industry, the ink production has become very expensive. This has increased the price of books even more, together with price of limited wood supply and high costs of transportation.

Overall impact

Books are now an artifact to be found only in the libraries of the old generation that unsuccessfully tried to pass them to the new technological savvy generation.

Printing industry side-effects

Number of trees cut

In 2008 the number of trees cut for book printing reached the number of 30 millions. Around 70% to 90% of these trees were coming from natural resources. Although several recycling project were developed trying to make people aware of the trees problem, this had no major impact on the number of trees cut. Moreover, not many people were willing to give their novel books to recycle, and even the students were reluctant of giving away their expensive study books. So, with the increase in paper books, there was a decrease in the number of books sent to recycling. By 2015, more than 90% of paper was coming from natural resources. Around that time the governments started to ban any kind of tree cutting activity and publishing companies were allowed to use only the paper available at that moment for printing.

Level of CO2 generated to print a book

To print a book weighting 1kg CO2 produced would be as much as 34kg. This influenced the availability of trees, the global warming issue, and resulted in another more reason for paper book production to be stopped. It appeared that the ecological side-effects created by the printing industry were too severe.

Demographics

Population becomes more tech-savvy

People like technology because it saves them time, improves the quality of life, and gives an image of superiority because they own the lastest gadgets on the market. With the internet era, there have been organized courses for old people to learn how to use a computer and keep up with technological innovation. Kids have grown up already with iPods, laptops and by 2009, iPhones so by 2020 all people are enrolled in programs to constanly prepare themselves in the usage of the latest technology. People learn faster how to use the technology and e-book readers become extremely popular among all ages.

Industry changes

The power of Google and the copyright laws
After Google finally settles their 3 year book-scan lawsuit in 2008, the company becomes more and more powerful. In the next 3 to 5 years Google starts scanning all books available and offers them as free e-books online creating a global digital library. This not only impacts the paper book market by having electronic versions of books available for free, but also increases the demand for e-readers. By the time government counters Google with new copyright laws to restrict and punish their actions, the e-books are already worldwide spread and the damage is done. Everyone holds an e-reader and although people have no more free access to new book titles, the paper book industry finds it difficult to recover.

E-books are available in all languages

Society is continually become more and more multi-cultural, with as a results their is huge diversification in use a language. The growth of this phenomenon proved to be a big burden to publishers and book stores as suddenly they had to print and carry all books in an increasing amount of languages. Advancement in fully automatic computer language translation and e-books were a enormous relief and solved this problem. People could now download the book in the original language and have their computer translate it to their language of choice.

Conclusion

With technology evolving quickly, virtually all possible disadvantages that ebook readers currently have versus paper books will disappear in the years to come. E-books will take over the book market by types of books, starting with study books and gradually taking over the regular book market. The issue of DRM will take some time and effort to overcome, but will never seriously hold back the evolution of e-books and e-book readers.