Amazon's Kindle is just one of the forces driving the sudden boom in ebooks. Many analysts think up-coming technology will push sales and feature possibilities even further.

E-readers improve. Features grow. E-book sales explode. And the next phase of reading comes into view.

Westwood, Calif. - Poetry is in the air, says poet Barbara Hamby as she leaves the stage at the recent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“It’s all going digital,” she says with a touch of, well, poetics, waving her hand toward the cavalcade of brightly festooned booths that dot the sun-dappled university lawn.

While those cloth-and-paper bound volumes known as “books” have been edging into the digisphere for some time now, the transformation of ink into electrons has reached a critical mass, say researchers, authors, and publishers.

“We’re at a tipping point right now,” says Janet Murray, director of Digital Media at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “It’s all about communication, and the new modes of communication are starting to transform the legacy media such as books in ways that we are still in the process of finding out.”

By most measurements, digital books are a mere page in the novel of publishing, which hovers annually around $25 billion. But in the last year, what was a budding niche market has had a major growth spurt.  [Jump]

[Continue] The Association of American Publishers (AAP), the industry’s primary trade group, has tracked digital book sales since 2003, when wholesale revenues amounted to $20 million. By 2007, that number had ambled up to $67 million. But in 2008, the figure nearly doubled to some $113 million.

This year is off to an equally heady start, says Ed McCoyd, director of digital policy for AAP, pointing to the whopping 173 percent jump in sales from January 2008.

There are many reasons for this explosion, including in no small part Google’s determination to scan all of human knowledge into its Library Project, which was just formatted for mobile devices in February. Another key driver is the proliferation of portable gadgets on which to read digital oeuvres, most notably the Amazon Kindle and Sony Digital Reader.

“As these appliances become more and more ubiquitous,” says Mr. McCoyd, “this sector of the publishing world is going to get much larger.”

More important to those who study and read books, though, are the new possibilities of digital content, or “the cool things I can do with it,” says writer and new Kindle enthusiast David Bartlett.

“I bought a Kindle expecting it to be my latest throwaway gadget and have been surprised to find it more absorbing as a place to read books than I thought,” says Mr. Bartlett, who says he can annotate the digital book, save these annotations, pull up footnotes instantly, and archive 1,200 books.

“Now I can read my favorite books on the run,” says 27-year-old Tyler Rhodes, as he browses book tables at the UCLA Festival. He reads his favorite authors on his iPhone, using an e-reader application (not the one recently released by Amazon for the Kindle format).

Mr. Rhodes says he just downloaded “American Gods” by Neil Gaiman and can easily bookmark his place, excerpt interesting passages, and share them with friends via his phone.

“It just makes the books more accessible,” he says. It doesn’t cut into his appreciation for the printed word, he notes, adding that he has a hardback version of the same book at home.

These are but a few of the possibilities of “books” in the digital era, says Virginia Kuhn, Associate Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles.

A professor who uses film as a classroom textbook and embedded video in her doctoral thesis, Ms. Kuhn is working with a new digital authoring tool dubbed Sophie (sophieproject.org).

The open source software was developed at the Institute for the Future of the Book, but the 2.0 version is under construction at USC with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

In a Sophie-created “book,” says Kuhn, think of the pages as being “thick,” or full of information sources. These might include video clips, music, narration, or a wide range of textual sources. The tools allow readers to go as far into the potentially unlimited additional material as they want to go.

For instance, she says, in a textbook, if you want to know everything there is to know about, say, a liver, you can keep opening the digital equivalent of footnotes, almost ad infinitum. What distinguishes Sophie as a coherent “book” is that the additional material is not opened through hyperlinks.

“You never leave the material assembled by the author,” says Kuhn, which retains the concept of a coherent work of authorship.

And equally important, you don’t have what she calls a hyper-distracted experience of zooming around the vast, but disconnected resources of the Internet.

“You enter a world and the tools to search it and plumb its depths and this will be the new form of experience that we call a book,” she says.

Sophie is publicly available in an early form, but Kuhn says, the second edition will arrive by the end of summer.

Many publishers have embraced the multi-media concept, and are moving into the fully digital era, particularly for non-fiction titles. But, says Dominique Raccah, president and founder of the independent publisher Sourcebooks in Chicago, once consumers interact with enough next-gen e-book, similar principles will apply to fiction as well.

“It’s an environment – a total experience – and readers want to be part of it,” she says.

The concept of a book has been evolving for a while, she says. Sourcebooks launched 22 years ago as an interactive, multimedia firm devoted to exploring all the possibilities of new media.

Now, says Mr. Raccah, that the social networking world of Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace define so much of the digisphere, her company has adapted its content.

She describes one of her up-and-coming young authors, Kaleb Nation, a 21-year-old writer with his first novel, “Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse,” coming out in September.

Thanks to his huge online fan community, cultivated via extensive blogs and postings, the novel broke into Amazon’s top 75 books for kids ages 9 to 12, she says.

“Its being excerpted, quoted, developed, and discussed online” amongst a growing community of fans, says Raccah. And, she adds with a laugh, “the actual book itself doesn’t even come out for four months.”

As so often with new technology, format wars can hinder its progress. In May 2008, AAP issued a call for industry e-publishing standards in the hopes that hardware and software issues can be ironed out.

Springer, a German publishing house that creates high-end reference books, for instance, must send digital books to Google in one format and to Amazon in another, says director of Global Marketing George Scotti.

“Once these protocols get figured out and widely adopted,” says Mr. Scotti, “this field is going to take off.”

Of course, for some there will simply never be a substitute for the touch of a heavy manifesto or the fragrance of a newly printed page.

The gadget guys are on that issue already, says AAP’s McCoyd. Indeed, Amazon is expected to announce yet another iteration of its popular Kindle reader at a press conference on Wednesday. Rumor says this version will be bigger, possibly in color, and particularly tailored to the needs of newspaper and periodical reading. McCoyd points out that mimicking the malleability of a newspaper or real book is the next frontier for the digital devices.

For example, the highly anticipated, soon-to-arrive reader from Plastic Logic is expected to be flexible. “So you can bend the pages back, just the way you would with a book,” he says.

This doesn’t move California resident Josh Legere as he strolls amongst the tables of literature at the L.A. Times festival. For him, there is nothing like a pulp-and-print, hold-it-in-your-hands novel.

“I spend all day at my job, at my computer, looking at screens,” says Mr. Legere. “It’s the last thing I want to do when I’m relaxing at home with a great story.”