An amazing thing happened at Brixton tube station this morning - I saw someone actually using an electronic book.
After being launched last year in the US by Amazon, and in the UK by Sony and Waterstones, these small gadgets were supposed to revolutionise the literary world.
They would, we were told, change the way we read, doing for books what the iPod did for music - although without the massive piracy, obviously.
Yet in the real world, they really don’t seem to have taken off.
The problem, it seems, is simple - there just aren’t any books to download.
Even my own Sony e-book has been relegated to a permanent home in my bedside drawer. All was well at first, and I even bought a couple of books from Waterstones for it, and loaded up some of the classics supplied free.
When I recently managed to break my collarbone in three places in a motorbike crash, I thought the e-book could be my saviour, helping make the horrific enforced tube journeys bearable.
However, it wasn’t to be.
Scouring Waterstone’s web site revealed precisely no books I actually wanted to read - with very little sign of any updates or activity at all since the Sony Reader was first launched. And as with Apple’s control of the music download market, going elsewhere for books isn’t really an option (although the odd author does ‘get’ ebook publishing, such as sci fi author Cory Doctorow, who provides free downloadable copies of all his books at his www.craphound.com website).
So, despite being a self confessed geek and obsessive early adopter, I did what I suspect every other e-book buyer has probably now done (apart from Brixton's one digital maverick) - put the gadget in a drawer and ordered some real books instead.
This is very bad news for the publishing industry.
For the music industry, it was piracy that really kickstarted the market for portable music players- and if its not careful, publishers are going to find themselves in the same situation. The start of ebook piracy is already happening online and as technology improves, and the gadgets become something you’d actually want to be seen with, it is only going to get worse.
It may well be a chicken and egg situation from the publisher’s point of view, especially given the pretty awful sales from its first stab at the ebook market last year.
But the publishing industry really does need to take the plunge - unless it wants to end up in as bad a state as the music industry.