I am a long-time user and advocate of e-books, going back to the advent of PeanutPress (now eReader.com, a division of Barnes & Noble) on the Palm PDA platform more than a decade ago. And yes, I agree that e-books will never be the equivalent of fine hardbacks. But they are a lot cheaper, and they are much nicer (and, depending on the book and seller, often less expensive) than cheap newsstand paperbacks, which is the more important comparison. And they are easier to manage, much less likely to become lost, and obviously much lighter and easier to carry on a business trip. And they can be much more environmentally friendly than paper publications.

The first thing to know about e-books is that despite all the Kindle promotion from Amazon.com, you don’t need a special gadget to read e-books. All the e-book publishers offer free reader software for multiple platforms. I have and use readers from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, eReader, and MobiPocket (another old line e-book publisher), plus the Adobe Digital Editions reader, on my Windows Vista tablet, and all of these publishers provide software for the iPad/iPhone, Android, and other mobile platforms.

Actually the Kindle, Nook and other hardware readers have several disadvantages, including monochrome displays, lock-in to a single publisher, and an inability to handle video clips, which probably will be embedded in the e-books of the future. They are hopeless as platforms for magazine publishing, where the iPad excels. And they add unnecessary weight to your briefcase on business trips. Also they have no backlight. While this gives them tremendous battery life, it makes their displays harder to read. I find my UX more legible than a dead-tree book specifically because of the backlight.

So why does all this matter to business executives? Mid-sized businesses are publishers, too. Whether it is the employee handbook, annual report, product information, or repair manuals for products, companies depend on publishing to convey important information to its constituencies. And e-publishing offers tremendous opportunities to deliver information more clearly, with more impact, and less impact on the environment than paper. Think of how the addition of embedded video clips demonstrating key operations could improve technical manuals. And that is just the start — take a tour of Time magazine’s first issue on the iPad and then think of the potential impact of your company’s next annual report on the same platform. Plenty of stock brokers carry iPads, and that technology could easily gain the mindshare in the market that can translate into a nice jump in stock price.

Picking the right publishing technology can have a large impact on success, and the right technology depends on the platforms. For instance, if your audience is likely to read your publication on smartphones, then you want a technology that resizes automatically to small screens. This rules out PDF, which presumes a screen large enough to display an entire page at a time. On a handheld that means microscopic type. A solution that allows free text flow combined with graphic resizing, such as an e-book/e-newspaper solution, and in particular one that supports the ePUB standard, is best. On the other hand, if your target readership is using iPads or (in the future) other slate computing appliances, then the e-magazine technologies can have much more impact. They will require professional layout, however.

Whichever choice you make, e-publishing can cut cost and complexity from distributing and updating publications, particularly to a global audience. And with no paper involved and given that they are being read on devices the users have anyway, they have a very low ecological impact. And your users can computer search them for specific information. Try that on a hardback!