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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...
You've got to understand what makes people tick. Here's an example advertising campaign that would (based on the ad campaigns I see that are succesful) make eBook sales skyrocket.
"eBooks are reading, TO THE EXXXXXTREME!"
The advertisements would show well tanned 18 year olds on mountain bikes, skateboards, and rollerblades doing their sport with an eBook in one hand. The ad would tell the people that for ultimate smack talk, there's nothing like the classics, easilly accessible. "Dude, this is totally the winter of YOUR discontent! SCORE!"
The commercial I see would end with someone biking their mountain bike down a rocky slope, yelling "Call ME ISHMEALLLLLLLL!!!!!" and cut to their parachute opening as the BASE jumper disapears into the jungle below.
Fade to an eBook for a second (it now has a big X painted on the black case to make it extreme, maybe a Type-R sticker to get the car crowd too), then end.
Before ebooks become popular, I think they need to be dirt cheap, not just slightly less expensive than a normal book. I mean really, when you cut out manufacturing and physically distributing a product, your costs go way down. The cover price should reflect that.
They way I've always looked at e-books is that they are a good to have for reference (searching for names, quotes, etc), but lack the tactile interactivity of a printed work. I think that no matter how small or efficent your reader is, it still won't be the same thing as paper. Electronic paper? Sounds like a good idea, but how do you turn the page?
Maybe what they should start doing if they want people to get into reading e-books is including a copy of the book (like a lot of technical books do currently) on mini-cd or something. The more and more people are exposed to it, the more likely they will start to like reading books electronicaly. Or, you just wasted a lot of money and no one will ever like reading ebooks.
stuff
I can't help the fact that, for me, a book still feels better then an electronic piece to read from.
Nothing can beat the feeling I get from sitting in a corner of my livingroom with a little light and holding and reading a good book.
For one, the smell a book can have is something i'll never get out of a piece of electronics.
I remember reading about a newwspaper, printed on what feels like real paper, but is in fact something electronic that can be reused a couple of times.
How nice would it be to have an empty book of let's say 400 pages, you plug it your computer and download a couple of chapters of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy on it. When done, download the next part.
42 + 1 = 42
I like to read lying down, to relax. It is difficult to do the same while watching tv because I have to keep my head propped up to see things right-side-up. I like to lay my head down and lay my hand down with the book on the bed or couch. It is a pain in the ass to turn pages, I have to roll over in order to see them, or hold the book up with my hand. I'm sure some of you know what I'm talking about. What would be nice is something with the form factor of a book that had an easy way of changing pages so you could read it lying down just looking on one side. It may even work just to get like a mini swivel monitor stand (goddamnit, I should have thought of it earlier, before Apple's patent). I think that what needs to be done is they need to get the devices a lot lighter, and think of the ways that they will be held to make it more convenient.
Everyone acts all surprised when they talk about eBook not being hugely popular. It is assumed that because it is a computerized version of a current media that it is superior. Arguably, most of current media has been improved using computers, but books aren't and probably won't ever be one of them.
Here is why:
1 - eBooks aren't cheap. The reader is expensive, and the electronic books aren't significantly cheaper than paper books.
2 - It is actually more difficult for most people to read off of a computer screen than it is to read printed text. (can anyone back this up with research?)
3 - Batteries die, books don't need batteries.
Granted, it's easier to carry around one eBook with 100 titles on it than 100 physical books, but realistically, who needs that many books in one sitting?
The makers of the eBook seem to be forgetting that in order for a product to succeed it must solve a problem and be cost efficient. The eBook is neither of those two things.
I wonder are there any iTunes/P2P-like plans for distributing ebooks? Something that could give the 'little guy' who wants to publish a book a chance to get his work seen without having to go through a publisher? It seems like most ebooks have to be distributed under a specific hardware platform, and not under something more general like a PDF.
Is it any wonder the market is dead? Who wants a book that only works on their desktop but not their palm pilot? Or on their pocketpc or not their Mac? Or works everywhere but has a dreadful selection of titles? Or only runs through a reader that is a piece of junk (e.g. MS Reader)?
But does that mean no one is interested? Of course not. Wander into a IRC book warez channel or a ebooks newsgroup and you'll find tens of thousands of books, lovingly hand scanned in for trading and available in formats such as
I do not believe that it is beyond the realms of probability that an XML format with some form of DRM could be produced. Until these vendors pull their fingers out of their arses and produce such an open format, they can look forward to their beloved market shrivelling on the vine.
I've done over 200 on my flatbed scanner in the last six months, for processing through Distributed Proofreaders. Once you get into the flow, a decently sized octavo book can be done in less than an hour. Holinshed's Chronicles (my current project) is obviously taking a little longer :).
The very high-end overhead document scanners are effectively fixed digital cameras with groovy software, so there's no real reason why an enthusiast couldn't jury rig a home-made digital camera document scanner. 5MP still isn't enough, though, for anything serious. To scan an A4 page at 400DPI requires around 15MP, and you'd need even more to get a decent DPI on folio volumes like Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Nah, a Palm makes a great ebook reader. And Palms are cheap like borscht, you can pick up a used Zire or Palm III/V for under $50. Hell, you can get a new Zire 21 for $99. Cost of the unit hasn't been an issue for a long time unless you're talking about one of those stupid only-reads-ebooks-and-costs-$300 devices like the Franklin Ebook reader.
Here's the problem I have had with the e-books as presented by the industry since day one. Cost of the books themselves. 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! If the Ebooks were reasonably priced for the lack of a physical thing that you can hold in your hands, like say around $2.50 per instead of $7 per, then there would have been a lot more interest than there has been so far.
In fact, there's been so little interest in Ebooks, I find the title of the article laughable. The bubble burst? What bubble? It was never there to begin with. The publishing industry is terrified of ebooks and never wanted them to succeed to begin with, which probably explains the asinine pricing model. A lot of the bigger publishers refused to even consider ebooks at all. A lot of the books I read on my palm come from either public domain sources like Project Gutenberg, or one of the few tree publishers that does seem to "get it", Baen Books. They even have a free library of a lot of their published stuff, a download from which of a book by David Weber eventually saw me going out and buying several of his books. They also have an interesting "webscription" system, which I am thinking about trying for a few months. Could be good. Unfortunately, they seem the exception rather than the rule when it comes to publishers and ebooks.
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).
I've often wondered why nobody has come up with an ebook reader that is based on the original Palm V (or Vx). Just make the screen 5x larger but keep the same thickness. The device could probably sell for less than $150 these days, and it could have basic PDA features. The idea here is to embrace the KISS strengths of a Palm, the thinness of the Palm V, and add a larger screen so that it's possible to read an e-book on the thing w/o constantly scrolling.
Amazing magic tricks
Ah yes... but I can change the fontsize and typeface to something I have less trouble with... you can't with a paper book... you're stuck with having to find your title in the large print specialist section... and with having to wait several months or years after the original version came out
Also a paper book is useless for a blind person... whereas an open format e-book can be fed through a text to speech synthesizer
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
It's weird, My security prof was just talking about this yesterday. He basically said what I have believed for a long time. Books generally don't fall victim to copyright infringement, because it takes too long, and costs too much to make photocopies, or print them out, and because, nobody wants to curl up in bed with their laptop, and i don't believe they ever will.
Maybe i'm just and old timer, but I think there's something bred into us that likes the feel of paper.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
... but due to sales, since it was an early starter, it's since been discontinued.
.rb format. (Gemstar killed this concept with the GEB1150)
I'm talking about the REB1100. The successor to the original Rocket, precursor to Gemstar's now also discontinued travesty of a version, the GEB1150.
Why's the 1100 great? Lessee.
1. I routinely get 30+ hours of battery life out of it. It goes for days.
2. I can almost drive by the light of the backlight. I sure as hell could read a paper book with it as a light source, and it could be indirect when the brightness was cranked. (caveat, cranking the brightness like that will cut battery life to 10-15 hours tops.)
3. Weighs noticeably less than a hardcover, about the same as a thick paperback - think The Stand (unabridged). Unit is molded to fit fairly naturally in your hand, with the page advance button under your thumb, just as a curled-over paperback would.
4. Screen size is that of a normal paperback, give or take.
5. Could add your own content via USB port, and there's a project on Sourceforge for converting docs to Rocket's
Things it lacks: Could always do with more battery life (what can't?), was a black & white monochrome screen (GEB1150 did have greyscale 256, but...), and uses the now virtually defunct SmartMedia card for memory expansion - would've preferred Compact Flash. Could also use a bit more internal memory, as it only had 8 Megs - still enough for around 8,000 pages.
It's fairly durable, but the screens can crack on you if you drop it at the right angle. Mine's cracked in the corner (after 4 or 5 drops) but the crack isn't getting any worse, and there's a plastic sheet of some sort over it so nothing's getting in there either. What's more, the crack is around the non-active border, so it doesn't even affect reading/viewing.
You can find them on eBay, and I have stumbled across them as display models in a few stores, notably OfficeMax. I also found one in a Best Buy.
If anyone wants to build the ultimate eBook reader, that's a good place to start.
As for content, someone's already mentioned Baen. To note, last I checked they released in RTF, Mobipocket, Rocket, Microsoft, and plain-duck HTML. (The interface for HTML is nice as well; it will keep track of the paragraph you last had the mouse cursor hovering over in whichever chapter, I think by cookie, and when you close, then reload the main book page, it brings you directly to that point. It also has a chapter list in a frame, and allows you to set the font.)
You thought that this sig was what you think that I thought you wanted me to think. I think.
I love books. I've got hundreds of them. When they sell an ebook that I can hand down to my great-great-great grandchildren without worrying about DRM, formats, and ease of use, I may buy one.
I just bought a bunch of books to give as Christmas presents. Can I do that with ebooks? Will my 68 year old mother read one? Can I give a 3 year old grandson an ebook that he can color in, put stickers on, and possibly chew on?
I have books that are over 150 years old. Some of them have notes that were written that long ago. Where will today's ebooks be in 150 years? Can I highlight in an ebook, underline text, and make notes that will still be there in 150 years?
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.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Yeah, eBooks suck. I read exactly one eBook I bought from Amazon when I had an iPaq handheld. It wasn't worth the trouble.
eJournals, OTOH, are likely the most important thing to happen to research since email. The simple fact that one can read an academic journal article in one window, then pull up the original text of a citation in another, changes everything.
As an undergrad 93-97, I spent some serious hours in the library waiting in line, photocopying, and fucking around with microfiche machines. I hated it and did as little as possible.
As a grad student today, I spend some serious hours with my wifi laptop, using Proquest from UMI, formerly known as University Microfilm, to get the content fast.
And Proquest sucks, in comparison to other services - it's just low-quality images of journal articles. When I use the ACM Portal, or Emerald, JStore, or any number of other services I get press-ready PDF files. I get citations I can copy and paste straight into my bibliography. It completely changes the experience.
And the great thing is, there's no lack of a market. eJournals are not going anywhere. It's cheaper for a University to pay for subscriptions to eJournal servicesthan it is to keep paper copies or maintain microfilm hardware.
eJournals are definitely where it's at, and I see most nonfiction and reference going that way in the near future. Pleasure reading - eBooks? Maybe next year, maybe never.
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?
But it's true even at the individual level. I routinely carry ten ebooks around in my palmtop. The palmtop I carry anyway for it's organization features. I'd need a big backpack and a strength building program to carry ten paper books.
As for minimum technology for maximum interaction, how have newspapers done against TV?
Answer: TV practically destroyed them. Newspapers still exist, but they have nowhere near the ubiquity and penetration they had prior to TV. Yet TV is a lot of technology for something that gives very little interaction. Moreover, TV proves the points that people don't really care so much for the paper experience that they wouldn't switch, and that they'll pay money (even a lot of money) for a viewer.
Nor is that the only example of people moving from paper to electronic. Have you used the web lately? Did you know that even a decade ago the only way to get timely information was paper journals? That product information was mailed to you in paper pamphlets?
The web demolished entire printing industries. And yet the web has all the same downsides that Asimov pointed out.
Someone will say, "yea, but the web improved immediacy." That's true, but that wasn't the only reason, nor even the primary reason. It won, largely, because of economics. Let's illustrate.
Someone here earlier said that a paperback cost about $1.20 to print, so there wasn't much savings in ebooks. He forgot about warehousing and shipping and such, but let's just call it $1.20 and presume the new costs of ebooks are a wash (they aren't, it's not even close, but we'll presume that anyway). If the publisher can sell the ebook for the same money as a regular book, that means they pull in another $1.20 per book. That represents a very substantial jump in profit.
Trust me, if they can figure out a way to get us to buy ebooks they will do it. There's more money to be made. And with DRM, they can substantially close the borrow and resell hole.
To go mainstream they'll have to subsidize the readers (or palmtops will have to be more ubiquitous) but ebook-capable devices can currently be produced for under $20 if they care to do it ... and the price drops every year. There is an inflection point coming; it will almost certainly happen before 2010.
The economics of paper books will become noncompetitive with ebooks within the next decade. And when that happens, the market will flip.
It's already happened in a bunch of cases. I don't know about you, but I used to have a bookshelf full of references so I could get my work done. Today I have only a couple of books, and they're more tutorial-style than reference. I get virtually all reference material from electronic stuff. Virtually all help material from electronic stuff too. In fact, most software publishers provide practically no paper documentation these days.
In many respects I consider this a step down in usability, but distribution costs dominated the equation from the point of view of the producers, and since we didn't have a choice in the matter we got these things rammed down our throats.
You will have to use ebooks whether you like it or not. It won't happen this year, or next, but by the middle of the next decade it will be difficult to find many texts in paper format.
This change is going to have some really widespread impacts. Consider what this is going to do to the bookstore, for instance. We probably won't have "bookstores" so much as "book kiosks." Not the same buying experience, and a big step down IMO, but those kiosks would be able to sell you almost any book that has ever been published and cost vastly less than a big storefront.
It's a brave new world.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Until the print display on ebook readers is at least 600 DPI, forget it. The print you read on a cheap paperback is 1200 DPI. The text displayed on your ebook reader is about 96 dpi, or the quality of a poor dotmatrix printout.
Studies have shown that difference in resolution slows reading by about 30% and causes eyestrain and headache.
The interesting thing is, most people will not identify these problems, rather just express a dissastisfaction with the overall experience.
a 600 DPI reflective display for an ebook reader is essential for the technology to take off.
Digital ink may be the answer. It will be interesting to find out.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
My experience is that labor is the biggest single cost in a product.
Labor is the entire cost of a product; supply and demand determine the value of the labor used to develop, replicate, and deliver a given product. You're still correct in that Amdahl's Law limits the effect that labor reductions in replication and delivery can have on the product's final price.
Will I retire or break 10K?
To use an analogy, this article is like saying because the bottom fell out of the dot-com market, the idea of doing business on the Internet is doomed.
Of course ebooks aren't selling in the same scale as paperbacks! We're still in the age of the early adopter. The tech isn't yet mature enough to attract the average reader. That doesn't mean it won't ever be. The article itself admits that the number of buyers of ebooks is increasing, just not as fast as they'd hoped.
Just let the price of reading solutions fall by a factor of ten or so while the resolution and clarity of available screens approach that of paper and the same sources that are bemoaning how few people buy ebooks will be stunned at how many people are.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
even ebook advocates tend to forget (or didn't even realized?!) the hidden pros of ebooks:
;)
- taking books on a trip
i remeber spending some time in irland some five years ago. i had 20 kg of books with me, after arrival i had to spend a day in bed - my back ached like hell - and i read maybe just 5 kg of them! this year i spend a whole month in ireland with some 20 books on my clie - ok, i just read 3 of them, but without any of the problems five years ago..
- reading in the darkness:
it's just a total difference (at least for me) between reading in the darkness without any distractions like even a bird flying by or my cat entering the room - i get much more sucked into a book when reading in the darkness..
- reading one-handed
if you like to read a book in bed you know what it means! you read on the left side, you left arm begins to hurt, the right gets stiff, you turn right.. - reading on my clie the problem suddenly completely disappeared!
- reading in the cold
if you ever read in a cold bedroom, you must know about the uncomfortable situation. after 10 minutes, both arms are cold. ok, you put them under the blanket - you hands get cold. nowadays i just crawl completely under the blanket and read in the darkness - and my cat loves that!
all thes sounds a bit silly - but for me it's such a difference!
PAT
SEO Test: TIGI und SEBASTIAN - Online Shop - V
through a book is a lot easier than "virtually flicking" through an ebook.
Have you ever done a search in an ebook? It's a lot easier than flipping through a book.
Have you tried Linux yet?
That, is a relative phrase. Low prices according to whom? Amazon.com's 10% off (look mah, no sales tax!) hardly counts as a big deal.
I perfer to get my books from half.com, I can afford them from there.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
It's the same thing as with mp3's: once you eliminate production and distribution cost, what is the point of having a publisher? The whole concept of a publisher is obsolete for almost all media. People just don't know it yet.
Ebooks failed because they were a concept pushed by publishers. They wanted to make a profit so they charged some money for their e-books. However that price bears little relation to any costs they have to make other than the cost associated with distributing the e-book (i.e. almost nothing). Then they wanted to protect their non existing investment and put inconvenient DRM shit on the e-books. Sadly, vendors of reader software/hardware all tried to push their proprietary formats so all of them lost and the e-book market never really emerged. Other than DRM there is little technical reason to introduce new formats. HTML + CSS was invented for this kind of thing.
The new e-book format is actually already out there. You can just browse the web and read news, magazines, technical documentation, etc. in a special purpose program called a web-browser. Soon you will be able to do this on mobile phones as well (3rd generation networks are being deployed as we speak). The e-book of the future will use this network (or future versions of it) and combine a comfortable screen with nice browser software. People will just publish stuff on their websites (some for free, some for profit). Rather than mass printing and distributing books you will just tell a commercial printer to print a book when you actually need a hardcopy.
We're in a transition period right now where all this is technically feasible but not really convenient yet. Printed material has a higher dpi and the convenience of not causing so much eye strain and being available if you go out of reach of the mobile phone network. This will not remain the case forever.
Jilles