Don’t Give Up on Enhanced Ebooks Yet
And yet, Arnaud Nourry, CEO of Hachette Livre, put the debate about the merits of ebooks in the spotlight again. He argued that the number of sales was only going to continue to decline, because “The ebook is a stupid product. It is exactly the same as print, except it’s electronic. There is no creativity, no enhancement, no real digital experience.” According to Nourry, attempts to add other forms of content to ebooks have failed. “We, as publishers, have not done a great job going digital. We’ve tried. We’ve tried enhanced or enriched ebooks—didn’t work. We’ve tried apps, websites with our content—we have one or two successes among a hundred failures.” Though he concludes there is hope for creating new digital forms of reading, he argues that those technologies will come from industries outside of publishing and by “[going] beyond the ebook on digital.”