Whether you love old fashioned books or not, I’m thinking they’ll be an expensive custom order product sooner than you think.

Why?

The traditional publishing industry is driving all but best selling authors to eBook.

Take, for example, Trey Ratcliff, author of A World in HDR, which deals with a new technology, high dynamic range (HDR) photography.

He got a $20,000 advance from the biggest photography publisher, Peachpit, and 15% of each copy sold.

Sounds pretty good — right?

Nope.

After that misadventure Ratcliff launched an online company called FlatBooks to self-publish and now earns an “80% profit margin”.

Read his story on GigaOm – Why e-books will be much bigger than you can imagine

In 2012 the interface for reading eBooks is still evolving. I don’t enjoy it. In the meantime, I’ll stick with audio.

Apple soon may be releasing new software to help put old publishing out of its misery. God speed.