Why aren't ebooks taking off? Not enough pirates

People regularly draw a comparison between the music industry and publishing. The Amazon Kindle, we are told, can be "the iPod of books"; everybody's desperate for the sort of radical success that iTunes has enjoyed; and they are fearful of the damage that digital media could do to an entrenched and slow-moving media business.

Everyone's looking at the pattern they've seen in music and video - an old medium changed radically by technology - and waiting for it to hit the book world. But the chances of that happening right now are very small indeed. Why? It's fairly straightforward.

The real reason that the music industry came around to the idea of downloads wasn't because they had a startling insight into the future, or even because Apple forced the issue by building a clever ecosystem around the iPod (it didn't launch the iTunes store until 2003). It was because customers were choosing to pirate instead.

To put it less glibly, the publishing industry isn't being forced to confront a radical shift in consumer behaviour caused by technology, because that scenario just is not happening. Customers aren't forcing the issue by choosing to abandon books and read pirated text instead. And this means the problem isn't there to be confronted.

Oh, yes, there are problems. The publishing industry is having trouble. People aren't buying books. Sales are down. Websites, supermarkets and megabookstores are taking over from smaller retailers and throttling the market.

But unlike the music business - who saw those lost customers head straight to Napster, Kazaa or Gnutella - the average book reader isn't turning to legally dubious sources for their novels, or meeting up with book dealers on street corners to pick up copies of the latest bestseller. If they want to share files, they can get somebody to lend them a copy, or go to a place for sharing this information that's wholly supported by the industry (you might know them as libraries).

But, when it comes down to it the real issue is that punters are just not bothering to buy as many books... or even any books at all.

Authors and publishers are embracing technology when it works for them - as a promotional tool or sales channel - but if they don't act now to boost the electronic book market, it seems unlikely that they'd be surprised tomorrow morning when a pirate had stolen their breakfast.

Piracy is a huge problem for industries that produce digital content, but right now you buy a book, not a text document hidden inside a sheaf of paper - however many ebook addicts might want to say otherwise. The book industry's distribution chains have been undermined by the rise of technology, but the physical product remains pretty solid.

In fact, the way most publishers look at it, publishing an electronic book encourages piracy, because it puts in-copyright text into a digital format which even if it has been locked down by DRM will be broken out in a matter of time simply because it can.

The music industry, meanwhile, created this change by switching to digital files instead of analogue recordings. Downloads may be replacing CDs, but that shift has only happened because the first technology enabled the second one. After all, without CDs to rip from in the first place, it would be a lot more difficult to get hold of music the way you want.

I'm not suggesting that the only way the electronic book industry can succeed is by promoting piracy. But without it, there's no whip to crack. There's no easy cause and effect to startle the publishers out of their leather armchairs and into action.

I suspect that the real change will come as more authors who are already part of the digital age push for new things. But that's a generational shift, and we're still a long way from it.

It's not that I don't believe electronic books can't be a success - just that without an outside factor that can push things faster than the industry is comfortable with, progress is always going to be very, very slow.