Will airlines begin to offer eBooks on flights the way they offer movies?

Last night I was flying on Virgin America and I was playing around on “Red,” the airline’s interactive entertainment system on the back on the seat and came across a “Read” button. When you push the button is says, “Coming soon,” which it has said since the airline launched back in 2007.

It made me wonder if they had plans to start featuring eBooks or short stories for free or for purchase. There are a number of ways that it could work. Perhaps you could sign in to an existing Amazon or Barnes & Noble account and access your digital bookshelf directly. Or perhaps the airline could sell bestsellers or short stories directly. Think Atlantic Fiction’s monthly short stories in the Kindle store.

It could also be a great place for publishers to market their books and give away sample chapters. I like to catch up on new music videos on Virgin’s entertainment system, so why not read a couple of chapters from a few new bestsellers to decide which ones I might actually like to buy and read.

It is also a good place to read newspapers, magazines or headlines. But there is something about reading books on airplanes that goes hand in hand.

What do you think?

While the Brooklyn Book Festival was much more about print than about eBooks, in a session called “The Transformation of the Book” poets and artists discussed the evolution of the book.

Poet/critic John Yau spoke about using a wiki to edit a recent book. “The idea of the book is more fluid, as it becomes a part of a mass media communication,” he said. “The book is more of a communicative gesture these days.”

For Mendi Lewis Obadike, an author/artist who works in digital media, said that a book is not about the physical object, but rather the collection of ideas that it contains. Lewis-Obadike uses the format to inform the content in her work. She explained that in one digital short story about not wanting to talk about things, the text appears and then disappears depnding on how you mouse over it.

When asked is books are dying, Lewis-Obadike said that while the economy of the print book might be dying, that books are not. Yau agreed that books are not going to die. “The book is changing, but I don’t think it is going to die,” he said. “Books exist in all different ways now.”

Poet Jen Bervin agreed. She said that the digital format can now inform that work. “The content can change. The shape of the work can change and this can inform the conversation happening about the book.”

Forrester Research has a new survey out on tablet computers and is reporting that 14% of U.S. online consumers, or 27 million people, say they intend to buy some kind of tablet in the next 12 months. The study also found the 11% of U.S. online consumers plan to buy a dedicated eReader in the next year.

Tablets and eReaders are winning out against more traditional computers. The survey found that only 4% of US online consumers say they intend to buy a desktop, 8% say they want to buy a netbook, and 13% say they want to buy a laptop. As more tablets enter the marketplace, they could become ubiquitous. The report states: “this data is encouraging for Apple’s would-be tablet competitors: There’s interest in the category that goes beyond the iPad.”

Still, there is some confusion surrounding what exactly a tablet is. The report says: “Only 10% of consumers in our June survey said that they’d heard of tablets other than the iPad. But when asked to name them in an open-ended response question, there were a lot of don’t know/can’t remember responses.”

As we near the end of a long and lazy summer, the publishing world is already plotting panel discussion ideas for next year.

Readers, writers, and publishing professionals can all help program the SXSW Interactive festival for March 2011–you can vote through the festival’s innovative SXSW Interactive PanelPicker.

We’ve listed fifteen of the publishing related panels, follow the individual links listed below to vote. Follow this link to read part one. The list follows below…

Kill The Publisher: Independent eBooks Liberate Content Creators, suggested by David Schloss, Mac Create, Inc.
“Since the time of Guttenberg’s press, the power–and the money–has gone to those who publish books, not to the creatives themselves. As the big book publishers grapple with the shift from analog to digital distribution they have cried that ‘the book is dead.’ The book is very much alive, it’s the bloated, bottom-feeding print publishers that are dying. This session will show you you can take well-crafted, targeted content and make it available on the Apple iBookstore and Kindle marketplace to reach readers that publishers couldn’t reach at speeds they can’t imagine.”

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SXSW Interactive is already gearing up for March 2011 and now is your chance to vote on the content at the show through the SXSW Interactive PanelPicker. Follow this link to see Part Two.

Ebooks and digital publishing are a hot topic this year. Here is a list of 15 of the 30 topics to chose from. Vote for your favorite here.

1. “Why Authors Should Think Like Indie Bands” suggested by Gavin St. Ours, The Gavin Show
Description: “The publishing world is wrought with uncertainty. On this panel, hear from literary agents and authors describe the way the industry is changing and why it doesn’t mean doom-and-gloom for unknown fiction writers. They’ll share success stories, practical advice, and opinions on the future of publishing.”

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By 2015, 29.4 million US consumers will own eReaders. This is according to a new report from Forrester Research called, “How eReaders Will Fare In A Tablet PC World,” by analyst James L. McQuivey.

According to the report, eReaders are facing challenges with the rise of tablet PCs. From the report: “iPad is already desired by more people than any single eReader, something we expect to only increase with time. However, with just 3.7 million eReaders in the US market at the end of 2009, there is plenty of room for eReaders to grab the attention of the one-fifth of the US online population that reads at least two books per month.”

As tablets gain steam, expect lower prices on traditional eReaders. More from the report: “We recommend that strategists planning the next wave of eReaders diversify the portfolio of eReading devices to secure their ownership of the reading experience, offering devices that range from stripped-down $49 pocket readers to full-color touch readers that erase the gap between today’s eReaders and tablet PCs.”

Comparing the rise of eBooks to the early days of television, Thebookdesigner.com has a piece up this week called The E-Book in 2020: What’s On Your Wishlist?.

Comparing the ePub format to a black and white TV with rabbit ears, the piece asks readers what they hope to see in eBooks a decade from now. The author of the piece Joel Friedlander imagines “the ability to merge texts from different ‘publishers’ to create your own mashup” and “beautiful typography.” While we have come a long way from Radio Shack’s 1986 electronic book, we still have a ways to go.

This blogger would love to imagine really high res color-rich screens that work on the brightest beach day and can be toned down so as not to be too harsh in the darkest winter night in Sweden. This Liquavista prototype might be the solution. But who knows this might already be adopted by next year. And by 2020, the stories might just be beamed straight into our brains Philip K. Dick-style.

What would you like to see?

In his New Yorker story this week, “Lenny Hearts Eunice,” comic novelist Gary Shteyngart imagines a world where digital books have replaced print books and teenagers hate the smell of moldy text.

Here’s an excerpt from one character’s blog, in the short story: “What kind of freaked me out was that I saw Len read a book. (No, it didn’t smell. He uses Pine-Sol on them.) He came home from work looking really down, and I guess he didn’t even notice that I caught him reading. And I don’t mean scanning a text like we did in EuroTrash Classics with that ‘Chatterhouse of Parma,’ I mean seriously reading. … I sneaked a peek and it was that Russian guy Tolesoy he was reading (I guess it figures, cause Lenny’s parents are from Russia). I thought Ben was really brain-smart because I saw him streaming ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ in that cafe in Rome, but this Tolesoy was a thousand-page-long book, not a stream, and Lenny was on page 930, almost finished.”

Do you believe this kind of illiterate society is part of our digital future?

With eBooks, remixed works of literature have a whole new toolkit at their disposal. Freelance game designer Sparky remixed some classic literature with a classic video game–the first visual entry in our World’s Longest Literary Remix contest and a gorgeous display of creativity.

Sparky explained her entry: “I’ve remixed my bit in the style of Oregon Trail, the classic Apple II game. Like Joe Mason, your Oregon Trail team has to make their way through a rough-and-tumble land with adversity at every turn. But unlike an Alger tale, the Oregon Trail usually ends with everyone dying of dysentery.” Read her excellent submission below.

She joins 150 pre-registered GalleyCat Reviews readers who have signed up to rewrite one page of Horatio Alger‘s novel, Joe’s Luck: Always Wide Awake. We will publish the remixed text as a free digital book. Each remix contributor will be eligible for a random drawing of special giveaway prizes.

If you want to participate in the next remix contest, email GalleyCat to get on the list. Three excellent sponsors have donated prizes, see them here.

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In the future, there are plenty of fruitful partnerships to be struck between publishers and streaming video companies. Currently thousands of Netflix users enjoy the “Watch Instantly” section of the popular DVD rental website–streaming movies straight to their computers, televisions, and iPads.

To help literary minded movie fans with Netflix accounts surf through the overwhelming selection, GalleyCat picked ten favorite Dramas Based on Contemporary Literature from the “Watch Instantly” section of Netflix. Someday, these links could fit inside digital books, connecting movie fans and lit fans on the same page.

Starting Out in the Evening: This Brian Morton novel adaptation stars the brilliant Frank Langella

Devil in a Blue Dress: Denzel Washington stars in this smoking adaptation of Walter Mosley‘s novel.

Iris: A critically-acclaimed adaptation of John Bayley‘s memoir about author Iris Murdoch.

Continue reading at GalleyCat.