iPad vs eBook, part thousand and one

This applematters.com link is yet another comment on what people see as the future of eBooks. 

I think author Chris Seibold makes some good points, namely that:
-the iPad (and whatever other new 'readers' that are about to be dumped onto the market) will be able to do more than display text-y ePub files
-publishers want to sell whatever they can with minimal investment
-ePub probably won't end up as the dominant form that people use to read 'eBooks' whatever they end up looking like, and people will gravitate to books that do more than display just text

But, I think he also misses a couple important points.  From my perspective as a book packager, here's the missing side of the argument:

1. ePub does not equal eBooks, and it's a mistake to think the publishing industry cares so much about ePub specifically.

Look, ePub is an okay format for some titles. ePub is basically an XML format designed for flexible display of running text.  Running text is what you see in a novel or an academic book; it's where there aren't interruptions (read: tables, columns, illustrations, etc.) to the layout of the book.  Check the current landscape of what is selling as an eBook and you'll see a preponderance of novels, probably for this reason.  If your book is a novel, converting it to an acceptable-looking eBook is a matter of a couple hundred bucks or fewer.

For the kind of books I make, though, ePub is unacceptable.  The Almanac, for example, is a thousand pages of tabular and semantically-laid-out information.  You just can't present that info in a running-text format.  Nobody would read it and if they could, they wouldn't be able to make sense of the information. For right now, though, I'm trying to figure out how to do exactly that, since my current options are either ePub (which I can make myself) or something like an iPad app, and I don't know yet how much that may cost and who would pay for it.

The Almanac is an extreme example, sure, but it points to the problems with the current incarnations of eBooks.  Only some books can cheaply be converted into eBooks.  With others, it is either expensive or prohibitive.

Maybe we're looking at eBooks version of HTML 1.0, and maybe ePub (or whatever standard format hopefully to emerge) will become much more capable.  Hell, maybe we'll collectively dump an 'eBook' format and publish everything in HTML, which is after all a page layout markup language.

The point is, publishers will do whatever they can do cheaply that presents the book in a meaningful way, ePub, app, or other, which takes me to point

2. The economics of book publishing are skewed heavily against publishers. 

The appeal of eBooks is that all there are no plant costs with electronic editions.  In other words, you pay to produce the eBook, and after that you don't have to pay the parallel costs from print edititions, things that include printing, warehousing, distribution and returns, etc., all of which are extremely expensive.

Even with eBooks, though, distributors like Amazon and Apple have the upper hand.  Amazon takes a ridiculous chunk of revenue off the top & I don't expect that Apple will turn out to be any more benevolent a dictator of whatever marketspace they're creating.

(Publishers eat lots of costs. Forget what you think you know, it's a lousy business for making tons of money.)

The point is, publishers are conservative with experimentation, because experimenting means outlaying lots of money.  A publisher will make a running-text eBook because it's really, really cheap, not because the eBook sales channel provides the kind of long-term data you'd want in order to force a wholesale shift to electronic publishing (it doesn't yet).  I wouldn't expect that outside of textbooks or techical/trade books (which are, no doubt, real profit centers), you're going to see a huge shift toward embedded media and whatnot.

That publishing has awoken so quickly to eBooks in that last year or so says a whole lot more about the nose-dive desperation in the industry than about publishers suddenly becoming early adopters. If publishing moves quickly to eBooks, its because it feels it has no other choice, not because it's an innovative industry by nature.

3. Can we please stop talking about the death of the book, or eBook, or whatever?

eBooks are a dramatically growing segment of the publishing industry.  Still, there's no strong evidence that says that the eBook market is killing the print book.  Look, if print sales are declining it's because people don't read books.  It's not because they don't want to buy print books.