Catalyst Group, who published a comparative usability study of eReaders in 2009, knows a lot more about eBook user experience than I do.

Tomorrow I’ll be participating in a panel discussion for Digital Book World called Reader Experience and eBooks: What UX Experts can Teach Digital Publishers. (A free webcast!) One of the points I’ll be making is that eBooks are only a part of the digital publishing landscape, even a fairly minor one up until now.  On balance, web publishing has been a far more important source of digital revenue for Wiley, and also is generally perceived as the area in which to evolve whole new product lines and revenue streams away from the print business. This seems to be changing as the eBook technologies and web technologies are converging, but still web publishing gets the lion’s share of investment in the sort of customer experience work that I do.  In fact, those of us with technologically focused jobs in the publishing business are practically mandated to break apart the very concept of the book.  It is an informal mantra around here that we don’t just want to put the book online, we want to create a value added service, get deeper into the customer’s workflow.  It comes up on every project.   We are not in the book business anymore, we are in a broader content and services business.  It is the status quo way to talk about digital if you are a person of ambition in the book business.

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