Interviewed by Eolake Stobblehouse

As of today 2008, e-books is still very much a marginal format, but I think it's only a matter of time before it becomes decidedly mainstream. How much time is the big question! Could be years, could be decades.
Since TidBITS is one of the few sites/companies I know which has significant success publishing e-books, I wanted to interview Adam Engst about the subject. He kindly agreed, so here we are:

Maccreator: What don't many know about e-books?
Adam Engst: I find that most people who haven't ever seen one of our ebooks thinks of them as they would a standard PDF from the Web - straight text, small fonts, perhaps awkward scrolling due to a two-column layout, etc. Once I get a chance to show them how we've designed our ebooks for reading onscreen with good-sized fonts, a single-column format, lots of internal and external links, and so on, they see the potential.

What kind of books are most likely to be successful as e-books now and in the future?
In my mind, the writing that will be the least successful as an ebook is serious fiction, which may simply be best enjoyed slowly while relaxing in a comfortable chair. The only real advantage to an ebook version of such a work is that it's easily portable and readable on devices like the Kindle. In contrast, technical books, reference works, and the kind of non-fiction that you dip into and out of, all work very well as ebooks. The best way to decide if any particular work will do well as an ebook is to think about whether it benefits from the kinds of things that are possible only when in a electronic format - searching, linking, multimedia, etc.

What technology is needed for e-books to become mainstream?
For true mainstream acceptance, we need not just a single ebook reading device, but a collection of them at different price points and that meet different needs. It's important to remember that it's about reading, not books specifically. People read newspapers and magazines and blogs and email messages and Web sites and all sorts of things, and the family of devices I imagine would be able to handle all of those equally well.

Is the Kindle any good?
For some values of good. :-) Amazon did a wonderful job with making it easy to browse and purchase books wirelessly, and overall, I think the interface works well given the compromises required by the use of E-Ink display technology. (It can display only a page at a time, eliminating the kind of direct manipulation we're used from the Mac and the iPhone.) The physical design is functional, but pretty darn ugly.

What would be your dream e-book reading gadget?
An iPod touch-like device the size of a paperback book, with the kind of screen quality we're used to from Apple, with full Wi-Fi (and perhaps 3G cellular) capabilities. And I think Apple should bundle a best-of-breed reading app that would access a specific part of the App Store for purchasing books and other reading material. The current iPhone and iPod touch are very good, but a little too small and too difficult to use one-handed.

Thanks to Adam Engst.

I'll permit myself an editorial comment: Clearly novels and such reading materials are very much at a disadvantage with today's technology. But I see no reason why a reading device should not be made within a few years which is at least as comfortable as a paper book. Perhaps even more: it can be lighter than most paper books, it can contain hundreds of books, and you are not stuck with whatever font the publisher selected, you can select a bigger and better typeface to suit your own taste.

Already the Amazon Kindle device's screen already looks very much like print on paper, not like a screen. What we would still need would be for the background to be closer to white instead of being decidedly grey. And perhaps for the screen to be a little bigger. But it's close.

Apart from that it's mainly a matter of social conditioning: current generations grew up with paper books, and they have nostalgic feelings for them. But if you take away the ideas in paper books, all you have is dead trees after all.

- Eolake Stobblehouse