" 'We haven't issued forecasts for the industry in two years, because the market's going nowhere,' said David Card, an analyst with Jupiter Media Metrix. 'E-books were a dumb idea. I am very negative on this market.'

Still, there is another side to this story, that makes the whole matter read a little bit like a mystery novel. Rather than swallowing their losses and moving on, the companies like Adobe Systems and Microsoft that make e-book software are standing firmly behind the business, insisting growth rates are strong and getting stronger....

A few other signs of encouragement: AOL Time Warner, which recently abandoned its own e-book publishing effort, has entered a partnership with an outside e-book publisher. And when former Nixon White House counsel John Dean decided to go public with his new theory on the identity of deep-throat, he opted for an e-book format. Dean plans to publish an e-book called 'The Deep Throat Brief' in June on the Salon.com Web site.

It is this ability in the Internet to reach large volumes of readers that makes e-book backers so confident in the format's eventual success. Nicholas Bogaty, director of the Open eBook Forum, which helps promote e-books, says the industry still has a way to go on developing consistent standards and more user-friendly technology....

But the mystery remains. Where are all these e-books that people are supposedly buying?" [USA Today, via Library Stuff]

At least some of them are libraries buying Rocketbook and netLibrary titles.

"Today, Lori Bell and I gave presentations on handheld use in libraries at the Suburban Library System's Technology Summit. Also, presenting was Darrell Walery, Director of Technology, Consolidated HS District 230. From him, we learned that there is a product called Webtarget that allows users to use their infrared port to connect to the Internet. The Webtarget product is manufacturer by TriBeam Wireless Access, a local company (Arlington Heights, IL)." [The Handheld Librarian]

I thought Thursday's Tech Summit went pretty well, and I was particularly interested to hear about Darrell's project. One thing in particular that I wanted to note was something he said about ebooks. I was surprised that the schools aren't using them as part of their Palm project, but Darrell said that this might change. He noted that while the teachers repeatedly say that PDA screens are too small for reading, he's never had a student say this.

When Lori was talking about her PDA project, she noted that some of the students found it easier to read ebooks than print books because of the lack of pagination. It seems that because they couldn't see how much of the book was left, it made the reading go faster and they weren't dreading how much of the book was still left to read.