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Electronic books are gaining popularity, especially amongst researchers, but there are still challenges ahead. The Online Information conference shows that after a couple of decades of hype and false expectations, ‘we might have reached the tipping point with ebooks’.

But the way in which e-books are used could have a big effect on the role of librarians and information professionals, with publishers in effect replacing librarians as intermediaries between reader and content.

According to Jan Palmen, senior vice president of Innodata Isogen, it had seemed obvious as long ago as 1999 that the e-book was just around the corner. Observers had predicted that the market for e-books would be worth $25bn by 2008. In reality, he noted, the trade revenue in 2007 for pure e-books was unlikely to have been any more than $30m.

Whatever the overall figures, e-books seem to have now become an important part of the information-retrieval puzzle for scientific researchers. ‘We have had very good feedback, especially from researchers,’ commented Olaf Ernst, president of eProduct management and innovation of Springer, which has more than 25,000 e-books, many of which are aimed at the scholarly market. For him, the reason behind the popularity of ebooks in research compared with other types of books is simple: ‘Researchers already do their day-to-day work online. In consumer markets you really have to convince them of a different way of reading books,’ he explained.