Gemstar Ebook Crashes, Burns

Robotech_Master writes "In a lengthy announcement on its ebook catalog page, Gemstar, owner of TV Guide and the Rocket/Gemstar eBook, has announced it is going out of the ebook business. Gemstar will not be selling any new devices or ebook content after July 16th. Of particular interest to those who purchased the newer Gemstar eBook models that eliminated the ability to install free content directly on the devices: 'We will also continue to provide the newly released Personal Content feature available through the web bookstore at least through July 16, 2006.' It's too bad, really; I've heard that the Gemstar has one of the most legible displays of any of the ebook alternatives available. They could have done quite well as general-purpose reading devices, if Gemstar had not locked them directly to its own overpriced content in a stunning demonstration of self-proctology."

Comments

What does this mean for GuildePlus+?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gemstar provides the TV Guide-like listings for my ATI AIW video card. Will this still be operational?

Term of the week

[r84x]

I would have to say that I have not heard a better term for stupidity in a while. "...a stunning demonstration of self-proctology." is a wonder of the english language. I applaud the author.

eBooks

[CaptainZapp]

In theory it could be a marvelous idea, especially for technical publications. For novels they somewhat lack the sexyness of the good ol' paper book (this goes especially for hardcovers and imo of course).

The publishers themselves seem to kill the goldeneggslayinggoose themselves due to absurd copy restrictions and non-compatible standards. Hell: Do you really want to buy three e-book readers at 500Euros a pop for the really meager catalogue out there.

I don't get their paranoia, though. What stops anybody of scanning a book in plain, good ol' ascii text and releasing it on the internet (else that this is illegal, of course)?

Re:eBooks

[jonathan_ingram]

And might I also mention that if you want to get involved in helping PG, we have a wonderful Distributed Proofreading project. It's now the main route through which books go to get only DP, and we're almost up to 1500 books processed. Anyone can join -- we need all the proofreaders we can get!

awkward evolutionary spur in the handheld world

[marcsiry]

To me, dedicated e-book readers seem to come from the same place as those portable DVD players that cost as much as a laptop with a DVD drive.

Why buy a one-purpose piece of hardware when there are solutions that perform that purpose well, and do other useful stuff?

To compound the problem, they release the content on a closed, proprietary platform that only runs on their hardware. It's the Vectrex of our time! (Not to slag Vectrex, I loved mine).

IMO a better path would have been to build a multi-purpose handheld optimized for e-book reading- license the Palm OS so that people could do all that other stuff too, but use a big, clear screen with dedicated nav buttons so it was the best darn e-book reading Palm money can buy. Or the best darn e-book reading Linux pad, I'm not picky.

It seems the downfall of this company (and many others) is they assume they are operating in a standalone universe. With that assumption, creating a closed system of readers and content makes sense (how else could someone have possibly thought DivX was a good idea?). Out in the wilds of the real world, they're murdered by their less annoying competition.

When bad ideas attack

[MrLint]

The thing that strikes me most about this article is not the fact that ebooks have gone no-where, but the reason why. As the one linked article states they were trying to lock everyone into their content only. Anyone with a clue could ahve told you this wasnt going to end well, unless you had the sun and the moon and the stars to offer.

However, I'm trying to look at the bigger picture here. In our recent memory there seem to be a bunch of really bad business ideas that some how make it thru the tedious corporate 'bad idea expeller'. Please recall 'divx' (caps not withstanding) the time limited psuedo-rental dvd scheme from Circuit City and a law firm. And now we have its successor, self-destructing media.

I have to ask myself have any of these clowns done any market research? How do they manage to ram thru these dumbass get rick quick schemes with no one noticing? I have to wonder what the pie charts look like at these meetings. 20% wont care what we do, 20% will be alienated, 30% arent customers anyway .. and so on. It feels like decisions made on the least negative instead of most positive.

Ebooks

[slux]

As long as the current copy protection mechanisms (of which Lawrence Lessig talks about in his excellent free_culture are in place, ebooks will not become common. Or I should say I hope people can see how useless they are and opt to not use them.

When you think of what the technology could do... You could have access to the digital version of any book, there would never be problems with acquiring a copy of a book. You could always get the book you wanted instantly from your local library, even through the net. Right now, the only thing they have is "gee-it's-new-technology"-effect, and they're really just severely restricted versions of real books.

But it's all inevitable. Even if every library in the world will decide to buy these pathetic excuses of a book, the unrestricted versions will come. They just won't be in the library. They'll be in p2p. Because we all know the ebook protection is fundamentally flawed.