News and shopping will always havean obvious home. People will actively search for information about the world and for items to buy, but what about comics? It’s not a necessity. It’s entertainment…it’s art. It has to compete, not with better comics, but with television, online video, music, video games, animation…etc etc etc.

And so our fates are intertwined. Fiction writing and comics are two industries that have classically been rooted in print publications that are moving and will have to continue moving to digital distribution methods. Newspapers are going to die faster than books will though, so the publishing industry should be watching closely. If cartoonists can succeed in setting up a subscription model to send comics to iPhones/iPods, there will be room to push fiction writing into the same domain. Looking at a picture and reading are not the same by any means, I’ve said before that I don’t think the technology is completely there for e-books to be popular, but it’s a path to follow.

During the height of the dotcom years the e-book market was predicted to be huge. This article from 2000 quotes an estimated market of 2.3 billion dollars in e-book sales by 2005. However, this article from last year estimates the market to be around 230 million this year…but within five years to get to between 3 and 5 billion.

While it’s true that e-book sales are slowly going up (and the number of books available digitally has increased significantly), it seems to be a running trend to predict billion dollar revenues and see far more modest returns in reality.

This could be somewhat discouraging, but I think that is a niche to be exploited. Text messaging, instant messages, blogs, the iphone/ipod/touch proof that people are comfortable using small portable devices to read and receive entertainment. The failure of this market has been a combination of a market that has not exactly fostered adventurous purchasing. (Especially not right now. The dotcom boom seems a hundred years ago). Also, only now are e-books really available easily. Amazon’s push with the Kindle is definitely a step in the right direction.

Sadly, in my mind, three things really stand in the way. First, these devices are too specialized. The kindle is an e-book reader and not much else. No one really wants to carry around an extra device and if they’re going to, it needs to do more than just e-books. The phone, music player, radio, video player, test messenger, camera, web browser, email is on the way. If it has e-book capability as well, it’ll get used.

Second, these solo devices are too expensive. If they are going to be e-book readers they need be priced realistically. When faced with buying an ipod or a touch or a Blackberry vs. an ebook reader for the same price, the multi-use (and flashier) tool is going to win every time. Considering that buying books will likely outstrip the cost of most data/phone plans, the Kindle turns into a money pit.

Those are both technological concerns. For writers though, there is one thing they have control over. The works themselves. The few people I know who do a lot of reading on portable devices enjoy reading newspapers and blogs. They prefer short works that they can finish in 15 minutes. Right, wrong, or otherwise the market is changing. Micro-fiction and episodic fiction, like the old serial novels, have an exciting future in the world of electronic books. In a way it’s sad that the epic novel is such a niche pleasure, but there’s a great deal of creative potential in shorter, digital fiction that I, personally, look forward to exploring.