I had high expectations for the 2012 London Book Fair, in particular the new Digital Zone. We are going through a digital revolution, when how one should – or is able to – read is as much a question as any. We expect to see boundaries being pushed, new ideas on ways of reading, how a book can be made visual and interactive, and how these new technological advances can change publishing and writing. There are endless possibilities, and where better to catch the first waves of these than at the Fair?

As I walked towards the Zone I flicked through the Fair guide. Some of the talks sounded good; others sounded more like sales pitches.  Digital publishing, for me, suggests new, innovative ways of making books – writers working in close conjunction with designers and publishers in order to make something truly exciting and original; the potential for this is huge. The reality, however (or at least, the reality at the Fair), was a potential that hadn’t been fully realised.

My first thoughts on entering the Digital Zone were, so here are the publishers and software developers, but where are the writers? Who is taking advantage of these possibilities?

When someone says “ebook”, the corresponding image shouldn’t just be a copy of its physical version. The point is that an e-book is not a book; it will never be paper bound, ready to be thumbed and dog-eared. But this is precisely why ebooks are so important to the development of the writing and reading experience. As excellent as the Kindle is, it is a storage unit; it is not a multimedia device. It does not change the way one reads, as the iPad does with its touch screen. With the iPad, you can be involved with an ebook in an entirely new way. Visual Editions, a London-based publisher who has pledged to create “great looking stories”, has done this beautifully with their recent iPad art book Composition No. 1, which can be read on “shuffle”.

These are the sorts of books that should have filled the Digital Zone at the Fair; instead I found that publishers were more concerned with making reading an extension of social networking through sharing libraries online. There were some who shared my concerns, such as one representative from Aptara. Like me, he shared the view that there is a boat being missed in digital publishing, that to make fiction work in an ebook environment, books have to be written in the first place with this in mind rather than just be converted from its existing form into a digital format.

Books have always had the potential to influence people by conveying ideas and beliefs, and now we have the possibility of changing how this is done, to determine the ways in which publishing can advance. If we are not careful, we will miss this opportunity and be left with online sharing libraries that will slowly gather dust, waiting desolately to be filled.