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By Paul Biba

Picture 1.png I guess this is the day for “part 2s”. We published earlier about Abbeville’s interview with Kassia Kroszer, and as a part of the series Abbeville now has an interview with O’Reilly’s VP of Digital Initiatives:

AMoS: You have written and spoken extensively about the e-book and its role in the future of publishing. What do you see as the advantages of the e-book over the book as traditionally printed? Does it have any insurmountable disadvantages?

AS: The most important advantage that e-books (and I use that term loosely to also include things like our Safari Books Online subscription service) is that they are connected to the wider network, to the Web. This is not a new format in the way that DVDs were a new format to replace VHS. This is a new medium. My colleague at O’Reilly, Joe Wikert, has a really great way of framing it. He talks about how the first TV shows were mostly just radio shows done on screen. It took a while for people to figure out what this new medium of television could do, and how to design content intended for a TV audience. It’s much the same with e-books today: most are just digital representations of printed books. Once the content is created primarily for a digital environment, and primarily for a digital audience, we’ll really see something happen.

On the other hand, printed books are a time-tested technology, and they aren’t going away anytime soon. To paraphrase Bob Stein, from the Institute for the Future of the Book, they are a device for transmitting ideas across time and space. Publishers (and writers) need first and foremost to focus on what “job” their books do for readers. For O’Reilly, many of our traditional books did the job of providing easy reference to technical content. Customers don’t buy products, they buy solutions to their own problems—and right now, Google does a pretty amazing job as a reference to technical content, so our reference sales have suffered. But there’s still a real need for detailed, instructional, definitive information, curated and crafted, and that’s where we continue to shine, regardless of whether someone reads our content in print or digitally.

 
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