Scenario 3: Paper, Paper, Paper

2007

With better hardware in 2007 the eBook started an revival but at the end the publishers didn’t want to create a lot of eBooks because there was almost no request from consumers for this particular book type.

2008

By the end of the year 2008 Google is forced to stop its book scanning projects by several law suits and terminated contracts with publishers. The only books that Google and the other scanning companies are allowed to scan, are books with expired copyrights. The whole e-book industry gets negative publicity and the readers’ interest towards e-books decrease.

E-book reader manufactures and e-publisher are launching big marketing campaigns to promote e-books. Some of the early adopters are willing to try out the new readers and e-books, but their experiences are negative because of bad readability, expensive readers, lack of unified formats and problems with DRM.

2009-2010

The e-book publishers and e-book reader manufactures are trying to improve the quality and readability of e-book readers, trying to agree on one unified e-book format and improve DRM. The feedback from the readers is still negative, and common standards for e-book format and DRM can’t be found. E-book readers are expensive, and people are not willing to invest $400 for a reader that is not even compatible with all e-book formats.

Then there also was the DRM Digital Rights Management which meant that the publisher of the book could decide what you can do with your officially bought book. Consumers were reluctant to buy eBooks with DRM and because of that the consumer who saw need for these kind of books decided to take their chance and download them from P2P or other piracy networks.

Publishers tried to stop these kind of ‘criminal’ activities and claimed that they had the right to decide what’s best for their consumers. Eventually consumers claimed that even though they want to buy an eBook including DRM they have go to a maze of different licensing and file types which meant that some people had to buy different books for different type of hardware.

2012-2013
Students prefer the physical book to the e-book version, as e-books are still too expensive and their laptops and pc's are already expensive enough to buy - E-book readers will never kick off.

In the mean time, technology has improved to allow for checks against illegal copying and more and more students are caught with plagiarism, resulting in a dramatic decline in knowledge development, as control over the control is hard to exercise.

2014-2015
Because of the low sales numbers, publishing companies stop publishing e-books. E-book reader manufactures decide to stop manufacturing e-book readers, and at the same time webshops selling e-books start to close down.

2016-2017
In 2017 e-books are basically forgotten. There are still a small number of scanned books in expired copyrights online, but he most of the readers have already forgotten the attempts to bring the e-books on the markets.