For editors and publishers of medical books, it is no longer a question of _if_ the electronic edition outsells the paper edition, but _when_. Mobile computing devices are now enormously powerful (recently a competitor won a grandmaster chess tournament with a chess program running on his mobile phone). The electronic editions of medical textbooks offer extraordinary portability (you can carry not just one book but dozens in your portable device; the equivalent of hundreds of kilograms, or metres of shelving). And in addition your electronic library can be searched and queried in seconds, and has the potential to include video and audio content as well as just text.

On the other hand, the process described above, of assembling a group of experts and getting them to write their chapters, remains a vital process. Though there are many sources of information on the internet, the critical mass of expertise in a well put-together textbook is still a first-class source of knowledge. Further, the process of writing is valuable in an academic sense (if not always a financial one) for the contributors. Medicine needs bastions against the onslaught of junk science, quack healers and big pharma, all out to twist the facts to suit their various agendas.

I do envisage a future when medical textbooks are no longer printed on paper, and no longer go through editions where the entire text is updated every few years. Instead, the textbook will be continually updated in electronic form, much as my laptop’s operating system updates itself every few days.

But something will definitely be lost, not least the olfactory, tactile and cognitive pleasures of sitting in a medical library surrounded by real, paper books, the preserved fruits of scholarship and orderliness.

-Aidan.