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Why Nobody Likes E-Books
CybrGuyRSB writes: "In today's Chicago Tribune, there is an interesting article about the total unpopularity of e-books. It seems to partly tie their failure into their copyright protection and briefly discusses the Skylarov case."
"You could download a whole book series from Gnutella in a matter of SECONDS, text would fly through the electronic ether faster than music ever did."
It's already happened. Use your fav file sharing tool (or course, you only use it for legal reasons, ha ha ha ha) and search for e-books or ebook. Not enough? Try some ebook websites/ftps. Try alt.binaries.ebook. Lots of stuff there. I COULD (*cough* could I said) get:
everything Douglas Adams has written
almost every O'Reilly book
All the works of Poe and Shakespeare
Fear and Loathing is Las Vegas
Steal this Book (by Abbie Hoffman) (heh)
Army Manuals
Tons of Lovecraft
Everything by Stephen King and Clive Barker
and about 200 compressed MB of other fun stuff.
Is it legal or right?
Meh.
People have been trading ebooks for a long time. Longer than MP3 trading has been around. Who DID'NT get a copy of The Cucoo's Egg from a BBS?What has the impact been?
Maybe none?
The problem with most e-books is that the format they are published in is quite literally a value subtracted format. You can't share them, you can't market them up, and the FBI is likely to show up at your door if you develop a tool to read them on your Linux box.
Plain text and its derivatives HTML, XML, etc. don't have any of these drawbacks, and they have considerable upside as well, like being able to use grep and find to search your collection of books. If e-books were in a text-based format then annotations, bookmarks, and a whole list of other physical book benefits would be taken care of automatically (Emacs, for example, would allow you to mark up your texts in ways you never dreamt of with a paper book). You would also maintain all of your fair use rights.
Publishers, on the other hand, would lose a fair amount of control.
Because of this most publishers (besides O'Reilly) are not interested in plain text e-books because they think that people will just steal them. Maybe they are right too. All I know is that e-books are not going to take off as long as these issues are not sorted out. People are not likely to purchase e-books as long as the format is closed, and publishers are unlikely to release more books in open formats for fear that people will just steal their work.
It sort of makes me wonder how well O'Reilly's electronic manuals sell.
Actully I read e-books all the time, mostly cause I can fit 20-30 on my handspring visor. I think if they all pick one format, and go with it, and do something where the ebook costs less, or you get the e-book free with the purchase of the regular book, it might work. Of course then thiers the whole copyright issue, but thats somthing the authors, not the publishers should decide about.
Oops....you'll know what I'm talkin about in a bit.
Also in college I double majored in English and Computer Science. I like being able to write in the margins of a book with a pen. I did that quite often in my English classes. I can then add my thoughts to the author's thoughts and thereby increase the value of the book, and the thoughts it contains.
How do you annotate an ebook?
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.
This brings up an interesting point. I've heard that the right to space shift (ie: coppying from CD to casette) is allowed, would the same principal apply to ebooks too?
(Probably not, given that it gets in the way of big business, but meh)
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I've said this before, but publishers are only hurting themselves with this insane obsession with spending millions on consumer-hostile "protection" schemes.
Look at Baen Books, which (in addition to dead trees) publishes books in electronic format, which uses good old documented and portable formats such as HTML and RTF with no passwords, encryption, "digital rights management", monitoring, locking the book to a single computer, or other nonsense, and which seems to be the only publusher of e-books that's actually making money at it.
I don't believe this is a coincidence. It may be time for other publishers to remove their heads from their asses, stop paying buckets of money to the concocters of baroque DRM schemes and various Congresscritters, observe Baen's experience, and learn. Imagine! A company that makes money, not by threatening its customers with legal action and hamstringing them with Evil Code, but by providing them a useful product at a reasonable price that yields a profit!
I went to the Baen books site and checked out the link to the Baen Free Library.
Jim Baen and Eric Flint get it when it comes to ebooks and intellectual property.
Check out the site, it's worth the read.
Steve M
When discussing E-Books, we should look at O'Reilly, and how they do E-Books. While true, it's just on a CD-ROM, it still very much applies. Yet O'Reilly doesnt encrypt it in any way. They make it very easy and portable to read the content, and they are successful. Then you look at why. They dont have to force stuff down our throat, or force us into submission, or tell us how we can read the book that we pay for. They just have good informative content, and give it at an acceptable price, and people respect them and buy the product. Now if all E-Books decided to work in this way, they would be much more successful.
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents
10. Cheap. They should cost about the same as a gameboy. I don't want to worry about losing/breaking a several hundred dollar reader. I could deal with losing ~fifty bucks. I may also want several, one for text books and reference works, one for my scifi collection, one for each hobby, etc.
11. I should be able to back up ebooks. When I loose one of those cheap readers I don't want to be out a thousand books.
12. I should have remote access to my complete library. This is a result of numbers 3 and 11. If I need a book not currently installed in the reader that is on my back up server I should be able to get it.
13. A mechanism to share books. Today I can lend a book to a friend. I would want ebooks to have a lend function that gives the lendee access to a book for a predetemined length of time and that is copy protected.
Steve M
Gee, why didn't some of the other dot.com outfits try doubling their prices? It makes as much sense as their other business models....
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Online publishing is only dead if you're a publisher.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I've been working primarily on computers for the last 12 years and I'm just done with reading from the monitor. I find that I'm more likely now to print off my email, PDF files or other things requiring lots of reading. It's not about the love of paper, but more that my eyes get blurry and tired after looking at the screen for too long. So what would tempt me to get an eBook? I thought Stephen King's idea of the eBook-only release was pretty compelling, but I don't want to read every page off the monitor.
Maybe I'm different from most people...but we've got a ways to go before staring at the piece of glass beats the old tried and true.
Besides, doesn't it bother anyone else that we've got a ray-gun pointing at our heads all day?
---- Please be nice in case my Slashdot karma ~= my real life karma.
Not quite so.
The Rocket ebook I have is slightly larger then a paperback. Not much so. You can also use a Palm, which is much smaller then a paperback.
Memory is cheap. I have a (nowadays) scant 16 meg in my Rocketbook. That can accomodate 20+ books. So, if I run to the bathroom, I can actually choose what book I want to read out of many. This is great on trips. You can go on vacation, and in the space of one book, bring 30.
As for my Visor, I have 72 meg of memory in that. I can store more books then I could read in there. Keep in mind that readers (at least the ones that I have seen) store books compressed. Text is very easy to compress, so, you can fit quite alot in there. If the reader comes with a memory card slot, forget it. You could practically store a whole library with the larger cards nowadays (ok, not quite, but you know what I mean.)
As for uploading stuff to your book, with space like that, chances are you dont have to do it often. Its been a couple of months since Ive uploaded stuff to my Rocket. I have The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings series, the whole Wheel of Time series, and some other stuff I havent gotten to on there. Thats about a good 10,000 pages of text, easily.
There are plenty of converters for different formats, so, whether you have a book in pdf, lit, rb, html, doc, pdb, or text, its not a problem to swtich from one to another.
Its not as much of a problem as you would think.
I was wary of all this when I first decided to spend 250 bucks on an electronic book, but Im quite happy I did now.
I've bought several printed books so far because I found the full text on the Web and liked what I saw. Most recently C++ In Action.
It has more to do with it than you think. You should check out paper prices sometime, they've increased immensely over the last 10 or 15 years. I don't know about computer books in particular, but generally speaking, say fiction, or your big non fiction areas like biography or business books, the markup on books is only like 40-50 percent, which may sound like a lot, but in comparison to other types of products like clothing, for instance, is nothing.
It's been about 10 years since I worked in the industry so my percentages may be a bit out of date, but I doubt it's changed that much.
I personally have never liked reading online content. I prefer printed materials for several reasons. (Yes, this includes computer related books.) I print out man pages when I am going to be reading them at length. I print out software manuals. Hell, I even print out web pages sometimes. I give you a few good reasons for this behavior.
1) Eye strain. I get eye strain easily from monitors, but not from printed pages.
2) I like to be able to read while laying in bed. It is kinda hard to do that with my desktop computer. No, I am not going to buy a laptop or PDA with ebook software just so that I can use technology in bed.
3) I don't have to worry about a hard drive crash destroying my library.
4) I like being able to put my finger between two pages to hold my place and filp around through other parts of the book.
5) No batteries required!
6) I can actually exercise ownership and fair use rights.
7) I like going to Barnes and Noble, grabbing a few books and sitting in their comfy chairs to read a little before making my purchasing decision.
Let's face it, the PUI (Printed User Interface) is simply more elegant, useful, and comfortable.
I own hundreds of books, perhaps over a thosand by now. I love the paper smell. I like fliping pages. I love going to the bookstore and being surrounded by millions of words and ideas. Ebooks will never have a place with me because they can not provide the same experience.
-LN
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.
And the reader is very nice for travelling, since it holds a number of books, and ends up taking up far less room and weight than the equivalent paper copies.
I can't see paper vanishing any time soon, and I think the download to PC style of ebook is a pain, but the dedicated reader devices are really good, and have their place in the market. And if nobody likes ebooks, why does a Google search turn up more than ten pages of ebook sites?
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The book is here, if you're curious: http://www.relisoft.com/book/
people read books for enjoyment and to get AWAY from tech not deeper into it.
Maybe you only say that because you're an old fogey? I'll concede that the technology has a long way to go. I've read som e-books on my IPaq and the small screen size, the strain of reading from a backlit display (although TrueType fonts are nice!) and worrying about running out of juice are a bother. I see no reason why this won't improve in the near future, though.
Remember everyone hated trains when they first came out and people said they'd rather travel by horse-driven cart than a train. But then a new generation grew up who didn't see it as a problem and actually appreciated the fact that it could get them where they wanted to a lot faster and a lot more comfortably.
Technology is a tool. It's one thing to work with technology to develop it and it's a whole other thing to use it to your advantage. There are times when I want to get away from the work part of technology but I still like it being used to my advantage. Don't forget that the car you drive and the dishwasher you use are all also the fruits of technology.
Mmmm.. Donuts
The Paper copy is better than the E-Book nowdays for quite a few reasons, for one, you can finish the paper copy and pass it on to a friend to read also without worrying that you're going to infringe on a copyright. Paper copy is YOURs to use and is freely distributable by YOU since you bought it, you just cant resell it but you can give it to a friend to use, you can copy a section to stick on your wall. With all that said, why the heck would you want to buy a E-book and get all the troubles that come with it, you cant copy it, you cant pass it on to another friend to read, you cant ( as far as I know ) donate it to the library..
Until the people who make these E-Books face up to the fact that people want the same rights that they get with their paper copy, the E-book is never going to be as popular. I sure as hell want my book to be mine and I want to be able to give it to a friend to read and enjoy too!
Using the franklin ebookman- its got a nice screen. But the point is - I refuse to pay hard
cover prices for an ebook. The costs of mfg and
distribution are minimal. Ebooks should be priced
based upon the royalty to author + a very nominal
distribution charge + a fair (ie 10 or 15%) mark
up to publisher. If they were all priced in
the $3-5 range I'd gladly pay.
But it will never serve for me the real function of my library: my trophy room.
That's what it's all about for many who love reading. Remind ourselves of all that we've learned, read, understood. Show any visitors what makes us tick, what we're interested in - and by absence what we're not. I'll admit it's even slightly arrogant: "See what I've read." For music lovers, it's their CD collections or Vinyl, for art lovers their walls or sculptures, for geeks their collections of totally obsolete computers and tech manuals. The trophy room.
Now, sell me a paperback that includes a free download of the text for the book, or let me download a book and have a copy shipped along later, and I'll pay more, happily. But an ebook on its own? For reference use only.
--Any sufficiently reliable magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Every E-book I have seen will not let me upload guttenberg texts to it.. I have to use "special" texts from "special" sources. This is what is killing it. How about my technical manuals? not availabie, a haynes manual for my Pontiac fiero? not available, how about some decent science fiction? not available.
So I can buy a E-book, and it can sit on the shelf with my ever useful sony data-discman... the Ebook of 1987.
No thanks. Until the solve all the above problems, an Ebook is just a joke.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I've held in my hands a book printed before 1500. Turned the pages, smelled the paper, looked at the illustrations, picked out a few words in latin. I've seen (in Hereford) a manuscript in use in 800. How worthless the old IBM punch cards, 8 inch floppies, disk-packs, etc. seem in comparison. ebooks might have a place, but they seem like the end of literacy to me.
...on college campuses. If the academic presses would wake up (they won't - they're academic, after all), and align with a couple of large universities, maybe Barnes & Noble's campus stores, and maybe RCA they could deliver an eBook reader to an incoming freshman for $400 and, each sememster, the freshman would pay $100-$150 for their course materials, which they could download at B&N (which would keep a record of the download so, in the case of loss, malfunction or theft, the student could redownload for free). B&N could also have a secure website where studffents could download patches - addendum, errata, etc. In the end, time, backpack space, paper and money, etc. is saved and the technology is used to a good end - as opposed to publishing Michael Crichton novels...