So e-books are taking over the world. Depending on who you ask, that’s either a good thing (readers who travel) or a very bad thing (publishers). Either way, the genie is out of the bottle for good. The big challenge is how to tap into the gift market.

If I purchase a p-book (you know, the traditional paper kind), I can read it myself, lend it to others, or give it away. There’s a lot of value in all three of those options. When I purchase an e-book, leaving aside the problem of being trapped on one type of e-reader, I can mainly just read it myself. That’s pretty limiting to the expansion of the market.

Barnes and Noble have tackled the lending issue with the Nook, which lets you lend an e-book to another Nook owner. While the book is out on loan, you get locked out of reading it yourself. But the loan feature has some major flaws, including the fact that you can only lend an e-book title once and there’s a two-week limit to the loan period. Who reads a loaned book in 2 weeks?

So far, no one has created a legal way for the general public to give e-books as gifts. There are ways to cheat to provide free copies to your friends, but that certainly isn’t happy news for either authors or publishers.

The illicit trading of music files is one of the ways that MP3s permanently transformed the music industry. In response, Apple started iTunes and legitimized the buying of music in single tracks. Now a whole “good” portion of the population is comfortable buying music online. Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t solved the issue of giving music as a gift, other than offering the ubiquitous gift card. E-books suffer the same fate.

Trouble is, gift cards don’t create emotional connections to a personally selected item, like a particular book can. With books being a popular gift (and my favorite), this is a big issue to solve. Wish I knew how to crack this one. I’d be sitting pretty on the royalties.

UPDATE – Sep. 29, 2010: Just discovered that Apple iTunes offers this service for gifting songs, so hopefully they can lead the way with e-books as well!

UPDATE – Nov. 19, 2010: And now the two big main players (Kindle and Kobo) are both offering this option. Love it!

Rob Walling recently wrote a blog post called Why Startup Founders Should Stop Reading Business Books. At first the title made me scoff, but when I read the post in detail, his arguments made a lot of sense.

Many business books are actually a short paper with some good points; the main ideas are often found in the introduction and maybe the first chapter. Sometimes the whole point of the book is contained in the flap copy. But a book, to be a book, has to have weight. Translation: the page count has to be much more than 25. So many redundant pages are added.

Rob’s target audience of startup web entrepreneurs doesn’t have time to read extra pages. They are busy “doing” and usually running their businesses by the seat of their pants. In this context, his advice makes sense. (And he provides an out to read for fun and interest, so Malcolm Gladwell is still “okay” – whew!)

What Rob misses is that not everyone can absorb and integrate new information in a meaningful way just by reading the bullet points of a PowerPoint presentation or short article. Most of us need stories to remember and apply the lessons. In order for the information to stick in our brains, and therefore be useful, we need context and repetition.

So maybe startup founders should stop reading business books, but the rest of us could benefit from reading great books that share valuable lessons. The question is, Which books are worth taking the time to read in full? What’s your take?

We’ve entered a time where getting a book to market is as simple as 1, 2, 3. First, write the book. Second, make sure it gets a thorough edit. Third, self-publish in print and e-book form. Boom — “published” author. That isn’t to say it’s easy, but there has certainly never been a better time to get a manuscript off the shelf and into the hands of interested readers.

But some are asking, in a world where anyone can become published, how do you find something “good” to read? How do readers sift through the exploding number of titles to find the gems in the pile?

The answer may be, “just as they do now.” Even with a flood of new titles available, it stands to reason readers will continue to choose titles using the same criteria they have in the past. Google has determined (through some fancy algorithms) that there are nearly 130 million published books in the world. Readers have managed thus far to sort through those millions of book titles to find the ones they’re interested in. With that in mind, one can only assume readers will be able to do the same as the self-published market explodes over the next few years.

People gravitate towards what they like. They find authors or genres or subject matters they care about and are interested in, and make choices out of that pool. In fact, adding more titles will only grow the pot for readers, giving them even greater options on the subjects they enjoy.

Author Scott Nicholson explains it well in his article on the topic. He offers the analogy that despite her popularity, he has no idea what Lady Gaga sings, nor does he ever care to. But he finds new music that does appeal to him, when he wants to, through the channels he always has. Finding book titles would be the same. He finds and reads what he already likes.

Perhaps the growing wave of self-published titles will create some complexity and debris in the market, but how much it affects consumer buying and reading habits, if at all, remains to be seen.