I was on the phone today talking to a prospective ZDocs author and she told me she had decided not to print her book but to sell her book first as an ebook. Ebooks were all the rage years ago, but sales have not been very robust and the enthusiasm has waned somewhat. But ebooks are a great concept whose time will probably come once consumer trends change to accommodate them.

For example, push advertising on the Internet failed in the early days when most consumers were using dial-up connections. Now that most of the world has a broadband connection, push advertising is coming back through the form of RSS feeds. I think that once enough consumers (called “critical mass”) are carrying their PDAs and using them to read books, then ebook sales will start to pick up. I also think that producers of information - publishers and self-publishers alike - will need to format their information for the new consumer.

Why I’m talking about ebooks today is that a recent visitor to this blog led me to an incredible article titled Quest for bestseller means lots of returned books, by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal on how expensive book returns are to publishers. If you’ve tried to sell your books in a book store, I’m sure you’ve been told by the bookstore owner that any books that do not sell will be returned to you. This article explains why the book industry is hampered by this system and just how much it costs publishers, the book industry and ultimately the book buyer. The article is fairly lengthy, but I found it very enlightening and worth the read.

Ebooks seems to be a perfect solution to the book-returns problem. Suppliers would move to this new distribution model overnight if the consumer would demand more ebooks. So the problem to me appears to be on the demand side (the book reader), not the supply side.

I told my potential customer that trying to sell her book in ebook format was a great idea despite the overall sluggish sales at this time. To me, the self-publishing business is all about minimizing your risk, which means minimizing your initial investment.

Times are changing. My prediction is that ebooks will be in higher demand in the near future and Amazon’s Kindle is a strong move in the right direction.