Book Publishing Faced a Fork in the Road ...

... and went both ways: It is interesting to watch how eBooks are evolving. On one hand, eBooks are turning into multimedia items that soon will not resemble books at all. In fact, they won't be. Amazon's latest Kindle (Fire) has become more than a book reader. It is in fact a cheap competitor to the iPad with the ability to process a variety of entertainment and educational formats. Books now have a tendency to become, well, movies. On the other hand, the very complexity of migrating material into various eBook formats has led to entrepeneurial businesses like Smashwords and Bookbaby, which are making text-heavy files (read: books) almost stupidly easy to produce and distribute. Thus, there could be more text-heavy books--such as novels and non-fiction works with simple format--than there have ever been before. This is a continuing irony. Even as the traditional book business--with its traditional publishers, traditional printers, and traditional bookstore distribution--seems to be collapsing, more titles than ever are being published. That's all thanks to technology, both the tools that make professional preparation easier and the ones that make delivery of the content more efficient and less risky. If you've got a lot of nerve, this is a great time to be in publishing. The Publishing Pro, LLC