Usually, at the end of each year, the media gaggle gathers, regurgitates the nonsense they’ve been spouting all year, and washes the stale bile down with a set of inconsequential predictions of what might happen next year. It’s a catchall opportunity for prognostication for an industry whose main contribution to society is inane gossip and fact-free misinterpretations of research and science.

Instead of being a silly beggar and making specific predictions of the future, all of which are almost guaranteed to be wrong, one way or another, I’d like to highlight a few of the future sources of ebook innovation.

None of them, I’d like to emphasise, are in any way related to the big publishing companies, which will have to work very hard just to remain in publishing in ten years time.

1. Reading systems

Almost everybody has settled on a very narrow range of features for ebook reading systems. Even the hyped Readmill did little more than add a few UI niceties to what the Kindle already offers via kindle.amazon.com. Just a cursory examination of the various reading systems implemented in the early days of computing (we had oodles of hypertext systems, once upon a time) or the messy innovations hammered together in the CD-ROM bubble, should give you enough of an idea of the range possible in this genre of apps.

Publishers are desperate enough for leverage against Amazon that a new innovative – app-only – reading system, coupled with a well designed distribution system, should be able to gain solid traction in the market. Just as long as it doesn’t try and beat Amazon at its own game, which is an insane act.

(You can’t beat an incumbent who has a majority lock on the market by fighting it toe-to-toe. You simply can’t. The usual rule of thumb in marketing is that, to even have a chance, you’d have to outspend the incumbent three to one. The alternative is to do something different; redefine the marketplace by using a different playbook. Which is why I think Kobo is doomed in the long run. It doesn’t matter how many deals they make, how well they match Amazon’s hardware or prices. They are playing the incumbent’s game, the incumbent owns the market in people’s minds, so everything Kobo does just reminds people of Amazon and reinforces the hold. The money it will take them to gain a substantial marketshare boggles the mind.)

2. Licensing models

Most book licensing today essentially follows one model: A publisher buys the publishing rights (and sometimes more) from the writer, and then acts as if the book is completely and thoroughly theirs. The rights are almost always exclusive, at least for the territories the publisher covers, the writer is largely powerless when it comes to the final artefact, and the writer gets paid a royalty based on sales(or not, some sales are exempt from royalty calculations, I’m told).

Royalty-based licensing isn’t the only model and it certainly isn’t the only model in use in publishing today, or even historically. Fixed fee licensing of work made for hire was, and is, common in certain sectors.

But what I’m interested in is non-exclusive licensing. In an ebook world, where writers gain a lot from being able to sell ebooks directly to their core audience, where new publishers bubble up from communities built around specific interests, non-exclusivity has a lot of economic advantages. A community-based publisher knows that exclusivity wouldn’t net them any more sales, since most of their business comes from community participation and loyalty. Writers know that selling exclusive rights to a publisher could net them less money because they’d get a smaller share of the revenue from their regular readers. There are a lot of cases where fixed fee, non-exclusive licensing would result in greater revenue and profits for both the publisher and writers.

The fixed-fee model could even enable writers to offer non-exclusive licensing for their back list for sale directly on their website, using an off-the-shelf ecommerce solution, saving a lot of transaction costs and remove a lot of friction.

There’s a lot of potential in trying out new licensing models. (Kickstarter could be the source of a few of them.)

3. Non-traditional entrants

I touched on this above. Communities are native on the web; they form around anything and everything, and come in many forms. Most large communities, though, require funds. Hosting costs money. Community management costs money. Publishing ebooks that are of interest to that community are one way of generating those funds.

Where things get interesting, though, is when you venture beyond non-commercial communities and look at the communities that have built around games, TV shows, movies, and comic books.

Most of these industries have all of the core competencies and talent required to create ebooks. They have writers, designers, illustrators, and, in many cases, much more technical know-how than most publishers. When coupled with a large user base whose tastes they are intimately familiar with, ebooks could become a veritable cash cow. They have the talent. They have the customers. They have the distribution and sales channel.

4. So many other things

Ebooks are the very definition of what Clayton Christensen called ‘disruptive innovations’. (You really really should be reading his books.) Ebooks change the playing field in so many ways that it becomes impossible to outline all of the paths the market could take, or all of the variations that will be played. Just know that the playing field is a lot bigger than the publishing industry thinks, and that they need to be prepared for competitors whose advantages seem wholly unfair.