Bubble Bursts for e-Books

Reuters has a piece noting that ebooks haven't lived up to the hype. Give it a few years, and publishers willing to issue non-DRM ebooks, and reading devices that go for days without being recharged and are as light as a paperback, and then we'll see...

Comments

Baen already did this

[bbn]

If you like to read scifi or fantasy, one publisher already did all this.

Go here and check Baens webscription: http://webscription.net/

Or check their free library where you can read ebooks for FREE: http://www.baen.com/library/

All their books are DRM free and available in several different formats, including HTML (which obviously can't be DRM'ed).

I bought lots of ebooks there primary because it is so easy and I get the book instantly. I wont touch any ebook that has DRM as those always try to limit the number of devices I can read them on. Today I am reading those books on my iPAQ PDA, but in a year I have most likely retired that device for something better.

Contrary to what others seem to be saying here, ebooks really works for me. I almost completely stopped reading ordinary books, always prefering to use the light ipaq over a heavy real book. The display is clear, bright and does not strain my eyes. The battery lasts about 10 hours when reading. The only times where the battery live is a problem is when I am home, and there I just hook it up to power when it runs out.

It is not perfect, but it is more than good enough. At least for fiction reading anyway - I might not want to use it for a science text book, or any other book with tables, pictures and the like. Some of my ebooks contain maps, which are completely unreadable on the ipaq (but you can read them on the computer of course).

Piracy!

[xixax]

Mike Hunt, a spokesperson for the Book Industry Assocoiation of America (BIAA) blames the decline in sales of e-books on rampant piracy. In a media conference, he said that "on average, twelve people read every book sold, that's eleven people *stealing* the content and depriving artists like Geoffrey Chaucer of their intellectual property". He also lambasted local governments and schools for supporting organised book sharing systems called "libraries", "who the hell is going to *buy* books when they are being handed out for free?". In closing, he outlined a plan where the BIAA would impose a sliding scale of royalties on anyone teaching how to read their products, "we acknowledge that some people read as a hobby, so 'Run Spot Run' will be quite inexpensive, but all technical literature will be written in Swahili so that a higher rate can be charged for specialist knowledge, kind of like how the bible used only be available in Latin".

Xix.

Re:I just want text on a screen

[Gilmoure]

Check out a used Newton. They have larger screens than Palms, can sync to Mac or PC and you can find USB adapters out there. The later versions (2000, 2001) are best but they run for $40-$80. 120 and 130's go for $10 on up. The 2K Newtons can also go online, surf the web, ftp, email, etc. They can take compact flash memory cards via PC card adapter (same as a laptop) as well as 802.11b cards. The battery life is around 5 days for mine, unless I'm using wireless. Then it goes down.

Re:Hardly surprising

[mst76]

Why the hell does the ebook version cost only a buck less than the paperback version? It only costs a buck to print and ship to distributors? That's friggin news to me!

A buck per book is actually pretty close, see this study (ok, so I nicked the link from someone else in the discussion). And those estimates are for pretty small runs, up to 4000 copies. The costs of printing, shipping and storage form a very small part of the final price of a book, most go to royalties, promotion, overhead and profit. I can easily pick up new public domain paperbacks for 1 - 1.5 euros, and these are not sold below cost.

Lying Liars

[taxman_10m]

Check out the prices on Al Franken's latest book at Amazon.com.

Lying Liars (hardcover): $14.97

Lying Liars (adobe ebook): $24.95

Gee, wonder why the ebooks aren't selling?

Re:Not only was the ultimate eBook reader out...

[__past__]

This is actually one of the biggest problems with e-books (apart from neither vendors nor customers being particularly interested in them):

You can read real books just fine even hundreds of years after they were printed. E-book-readers will, like all hardware and software products, evolve, sometimes breaking compatibility. If I would decide to buy one today, it is unlikely that I can read the books I have for it in 50 years unless I keep the reader around and working. And keeping a ton of different readers for all my books in different formats doesn't sound all that attractive either.

This is of course worse with brain-dead DRM formats, that will likely be updated or replaced everytime they are cracked, which propably won't take long if there would be enough interest. But even HTML evolved quite a bit, and I doubt modern browsers get the first versions quite right - and it's just 10 years old.