Consumers' abandonment of printed media signals an end of traditional book culture and the rise of a different kind of literary community. E-books account for 10% of Penguin Books total book sales, and are expected to account for 40% of Amazon.com's. These numbers, compounded by consistant Kindle sales and the much-hyped release of the iPad suggest that we are not disengaging from literature itself, but merely its native medium. If print ads are a staple of your marketing budget, if you want to make a splash in the tradeshow space or if you have a stack of novels on your nightstand, read on.

Being a designer, I find the most poignant casualty in the decline of the print media to be the visibility of the book cover. Cover art is a powerful vehicle for sales and for interpersonal connection. I bought Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals after the cover, perched on my mother's nightstand, stole my heart. I bought Christopher Hitchens' The Portable Atheist after ogling the cover's typography as a fellow passenger read it on an E line train. The Kindle and the iPad are both (understandably) geared towards the user and not the passenger sitting across from the user on the train or next to her at the beach.

The NYT points out that "in an e-book era, you can’t even judge a book by a cover" and thus unique reader-to-reader connections are lost. Similarly, so is a great source of free advertising/endorsements for books; the industrial design of the iPad and Kindle eliminates that channel completely. Websites like goodreads.com have attempted to create an online space for the book community through social media, offering users updates on book reccomendations from friends, tools to rank books you've read and books you'd like to read, and even book club and trivia features.

Where e-books remove the more traditional components of peer-to-peer interactivity from book culture, however, they also add a considerable amount of value by introducing the kind of interactivity that Facebook has made second-nature. Penguin Books recently demoed a rich multimedia e-book experience which included touch response, embedded audio, video and even live chat between readers. The concept of books as apps is a revolutionary one.

While the more recent innovations are mostly within the educational and children's realm, there are direct implications for the trade magazines and the many companies use them as key advertising channels. Instead of being confined to the 2D footprint of a quarter page ad in a national architecture magazine, a firm might find themselves able to offer an interactive portfolio ad that allows users to browse through a targeted selection of projects. The tradeshow, and conference presentation space is also likely to benefit from these innovations. An informational presentation app on an iPad can offer a more rich, targeted, and user-guided experience and the success rates of this experience can be closely monitored and measured. The possibilities of e-books and book apps are both infinite and infinitely exciting.

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