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What Will It Take For eBook Adoption?
zmcnulty writes "Gizmodo has a new weekly feature that appears to be off to a great start: their first 'Feature Creep' writeup (by Sanford May) is an excellent overview of some of the obstacles standing in the way of adoption of eBooks, and more importantly, a handheld device that supports them. We've probably all heard of the Sony Librie's lukewarm reception, but if you're not familiar with the somewhat stunted eBook market, this is an excellent essay to get you on your way."
Good books that people want to read and which will only be ported to this medium.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
The common wisdom is that eBooks will have a hard time for two reasons: bad reader devices and book junkies opting only for the hard stuff, the dead-tree form factor.
There will come a day when there is a generation of folks who use ebooks and consider printed books cumbersome and an anachronism. I'm not part of that generation but I see it coming.
I do remember doing some research back in the early 80's with kids that had reading disabilities and we found that there was a difference in comprehension when reading from a monitor (more or less direct light) versus a printed page (reflected light). Direct light seemed to yield better comprehension. We controlled for a lot, but not all, contravening variables so I don't know if this is cogent to the ebook debate.
Cheers!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Cory Doctorow (who reasonably knows a thing or two about electronic publishing) has a pretty good piece disassembling the Gizmodo article here: Ebook column that gets it all wrong
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I'm going to go to my grave preferring paper, regardless of what technology comes along between now and then.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I will buy an ebook when I can read it as comfortably as a normal book. High contrast, high resolution, readable in daylight.
If there was a truly comfortable, intuitive, and usable reader with a wide selection of books then I might be interested. You need to be able to read under any light, and it can't be any more cumbersome than your standard novel. The graphics would have to be print quality.
And obviously the price would have to be reasonable, probably less than $100.
E-books fail for me because I would rather read somewhere else than infront of my computer screen.
I spend all day at work in front of this screen, why would I want to read a book on it when I can sit in a nice relaxing place without fans humming away or a CRT brightly lit in my face..
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It needs to be as cheap, or cheaper than a book. Hardy, so it can survive getting wet/dropped. And readable, like a book, not a flickery CRT or expensive LCD. Let's face facts, it's not going to happen for a while. It's a materials problem, not a software or standard hardware one.
And I agree with his interpretation from his article: " Ebook column that gets it all wrong Gizmodo has a new column called "Feature Creep," and they kicked it off with an editorial about the future of ebooks that is striking for its complete disregard for the actual marketplace experiences with ebooks. It's full of hoary chestnuts about ebooks that have been emptily mouthed for 10 years ("Call it digital paper or electronic ink, it's the future of eBooks.") and aside from the occassional iPod comparison, there's hardly a paragraph in there that couldn't have been written in 1997 -- nor one that takes note of any of the events since then (well, to be fair, there's also a lot of puffery stuck in there to promote an ebook company called Vertical that probably didn't exist in 1997, but that's beside the point). Take DRM. The author asserts on the one hand that DRM can work, and that it won't be so invasive that it turns readers (whom the author insists on calling "consumers," an odious buzzword that invokes Gibson's description in Idoru, "...a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed") off. This despite the actual marketplace fact that all DRM becomes invasive (ask any copyright policy maker in a country that allows parallel importing how he feels about the "lightweight" region-coding DRM on DVDs that reverses the laws he was elected to enact). This despite the actual marketplace fact that DRM is generally broken within a few days of engagement with the public, often by teenagers, grad students, or people with ready acccess to sophisticated DRM-cracking tools like Google and the sinister Shift key (for more on DRM, see my DRM talk)" http://www.boingboing.net/2004/07/29/ebook_column_ that_ge.html
// Empires come and go we live forever
Although a good idea, I dont read e-books because I really cant stand reading large documents on a screen. It is much more comfortable for me to read on a page. Also, who thinks that e-books are such a good idea? We have paper documents going back 3000+ years (papyrus to be exact). But already disks from 10 years ago are obsolete. Electronic storage media is going obsolete so fast that I dont think I trust it to hold a record of humanity.
Personally, I prefer having a physical book in my hand to page through rather then trying to read something on a screen. An actual book just feels more "solid" and "real" to me. But, there are some advantages to ebooks, especially when used as a reference document. The good old ctrl-F makes finding specific information much faster then looking in an index or table of contents. Also, If you forget your ebook somewhere, it is just a matter of connecting to your home computer to download it wherever you may happen to be.
Cory Doctorow has a fantastic commentary on how wrong this article is, concentrating especially on the authors credulous assertion that DRM is an absolute requirement for the ebooks market. Says Cory: "But the author goes further and asserts that without DRM, there will be no market for entertainment product ever again ("If publishers stop wanting DRM, it's the end of popular creative arts. Not as we know them, but period.") despite the fact that the software industry got bigger when it abandoned DRM, and despite the fact that no new medium has ever succeeded by appealing to the virtues of the medium before it [...]" Well worth a read.
Openness.
I should be able to buy an E-book and used it on ANY reader, my palm, my Zaurus, My Wince device, I should be able to also read it on the PC,MAC,etc...
If e-books are not in a standard and universal format then they are absolutely doomed.
The best ebook reader I had was a Rocketbook. only because I had a program to create my own Ebooks for it from guttenberg texts or other ebooks I cracked so I could convert them.
Although the device has more technical books in it than anything else.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm reading Andre Norton's Time Traders from the Baen Free Library using Mobireader on a Palm Zaire 72.
I'm not thrilled with it, preferring a real book, but it is readable and the ability (if I actually bought a dictionary for my palm) to look up words right there and make annotations is pretty cool.
Tech books seem more likely, but the convience of having a number of books at no additional weight is really nice, especially when I travel.
The biggest thing killing ebooks right now? High cost and DRM. I don't want to pay more (or even the same) for an e-book and I want to be able to read it on several devices.
Audible.com has better pricing (and they have to pay someone to read the thing) so I'm not sure why e-books don't.
Well, nothing can match the tactile feel of pages in your hand. It's just something that i will always like.
;)
Now, for reading docs on a computer screen (ebooks included), i wouldn't have thought i'd ever like it much....until i got dual displays. One for holding whatever i was reading and one for doing whatever i was doing. It's made my life much easier. i still don't really enjoy reading a book on screen though. Just something about it i don't like.
Maybe it's just me, but when i get a really, really, really tough bug, i'll print out the code and go for a walk, reading the code with pen in hand. Dunno why that helps sometimes, but it sure has solved some very sticky stuff for me in the past. i might be just odd though
Just some tweaks to the interface. Every 500 wor words should be displayed on an individual sheet of e-paper (double-sided) with the PGDN and PGUP functions controlled by turning the page. Oh, and it should also be portable, and rely on solar energy for illumination.
"It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created." Dr. Richard Wallace
The media is wrong for books.
What I do see happening with extreme speed is on demand paperback publishing.
The big publishing companies are presently not in the business of book creation. They are in the business of manufacture and distribution of wood products. Instead of varnish, they cover theirs in ink.
It makes MUCH more sense store the books electronic at a site, and use a credit card (or cell phone) operated printer that can produce a good quality bound paperback in a matter of ten minutes or so.
"Bookstore" will be the place you go to get the book. They'll be able to have one or two on the shelves of popular books for browsing and tens of thousands of browseable book jackets as well. You'll also be able to go online and decide what book you want and have it "sent" to that printer or possibly even bring your own home-made or open source book on flash or thumb drive or something and have it printed.
Wired: Kinkos
Tired: Borders
Expired: Using Wired Magazine to sound hip.
--AP
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
eBook UI is a major problem. Part of the pleasure of reading a book comes from the tactile quality of handling the pages; there's no equivalent for that of reading on the screen. Books are a convenient medium, they don't need a power source, you can curl up with a good book in bed (OK if you're a serious geek you can probably curl up with your laptop in bed also, but you get my point). You can take them on holiday and not be too bothered if they get lost/damaged. Bring back printed software documentation, I say.
* A reader that is light, inexpensive, with excellent graphics, that can easily be read in the sun.
* The reader must allow me to upload any text, not just from its own selection. This includes raw text files, html files and pdf. If I can't use it for papers, references and public domain/copyright expired works, it's not much good for me.
* The books need to be _mine_, in the same way that dead-tree versions are today. I can keep the copy for as long as I want, I can make backups to my hearts content, and I can sell it on, or give it away if or when I tire of it. No tying it to a particular reader in other words. I would not appreciate having to rebuy my library, just because my reader up and died.
* Neither books nor reader is to require any kind of interaction with the manufacturer or seller in any way, once I purchased it. I on't want to feel tied down, and I don't want to feel like I'm just borrowing the thing, not owning it.
I'm waiting...
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
This is a little tainted because the inital DRM efforts, in addition to being almost completely useless, were also extrememly draconian. It's no wonder people weren't buying the readers if the industry is treating them with that much hostility.
One more thing I'd like to point out. I don't know how well it's doing in the grand scheme of things, but the Baen Webscription Service doesn't seem to have killed their paperback production, even though their books are completely without DRM.
I read the internet for the articles.
Rampant piracy.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I've always thought that if they could get school textbooks realeased on these things at reasonable prices ($20 instead of $90), there would be an instant market that would nearly guarantee success. It amazes me this hasn't been done yet. It's possibly the ideal market for these devices.
The eBook industry may be stunted for some, but we're doing just fine selling PDF versions of our Pragmatic Bookshelf titles.
/\ndy
*Many* of our customers choose to buy what we call a "combo pack", that gives them both the dead-tree version and a searchable, non-DRM restricted PDF file. While I think the dead-tree form has the best ergonomics, the PDF is really handy for reading on airplanes, etc.
Paper is better in some ways and eBooks are better in others. Use the right tool for the job!
--
Maybe I'm just a gadget freak but, frankly, I've never understood the problem. I read paper books and a few magazines as well, but don't much care how the words get in front of my eyeballs.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Personally, I own two PDA's, including the new Dell Axim X30 high.
.html, which sucks for some reason. (I can play quake 2, but not read a html page > 500kb?)
I was shocked at the lack of simple software for e-Books. I tried loading a html book into it. IE slows down more than a sunday driver at a crossing.
It was painful to use. A pda is not much smaller than a flimsy paperback. I am talking about travel reading, making the most of those flights, taxis, trains.
We can get content from the web - that is fine. We can read enough news - but some good books wouldn't go amiss.
I downloaded copies of Terry Pratchets Discworld, all of them. I guess this is legitimate since I have all of them in hard/paperback at home.
Some are TXT, they read best. Some are
I think the real problem is, book reader costs. The cost of that little LCD. Lets get the market adoption of those to a critical mass. People who have them now might not appreciate reading a book via it, and see it as a reminder / toy.
Common format - I installed Acrobat reader on my PDA, blam, half the screen lines faded out wierd, froze, adn I had to soft reset. Thanks Adobe. *cough*wankers*cough*
Sorry that was for them handling their PDF encryption the way they did.
So, I would happily pay money for a book. I am writing my own eBook reader for simple txt and html files. I want 'next page' that cleanly replaces the page. I want to move my eyes to the top, like a book, not fix them at one point (scrolling) and jitter as I 'page down'
I think moving your eyes as you read is less stressful.
Also, a simple 'dog ear' function that remembers where you were.
Oh, and when I read a book, and it makes a reference to a clue before, a quick 'find last reference' of a word might be nice.
I think footnotes should be placed inside and then replaced with a *, which you can tap to view. (since they are no longer footnotes, we can call them annotations?)
Of course, when we effectively zero the costs of publishing, what are publishers good for? Of course, they can tie thier writers into thier e-Books if they publish the hardcopies also.
They could get a small fee for supporting thier site and download bandwidth. But as I see it, 95% at least of the price I pay should go to the Author.
Then we can see eBooks at very low prices. And the only ones who will loose out are the publishers. Who cares about them?
Now we need some way of moving music into a computer so we can listen to it on the move... that woudl rule, then we could... no it sounds like a silly idea. You cannot get rid of music publishers.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Indeed a nice, informative article. Just a handful of comments, if I may: .TXT, despite all efforts. From RocketBook to XML-based FictionBook, .PDF attempts to be a book and of course Microsoft, the possible customer is confused, and that doesn't add to the ebooks popularity. Therefore, it is amazing how many books still sirculate around in .DOC format
* the way PDAs are evolving, they are the most likely platform for ebooks evolution. Sure enough, no one wants to carry a full-scale laptop just to read in the underground. But what the author suggests, like an IPOD-like device for books is an overdoze as well. Why would I want to carry my PDA, an IPOD, AND a special device to read text, when there is a device that can allow me to do all of that?
* the biggest mistake made so far by numerous companies trying to promote ebooks is the fact that they are trying to blindly emulate a book. Why have a hard cover, unfoldable double screens and similar nonsense, if not only for nostalgic reasons? Where is *innovation* in that?
* standarts. The ONLY existing standart right now is
* DRM issues. Sure, authors want to be paid. My guess is that the OSS movement applied to old good arts will not work, as artists don't want to create in their spare time =) But none of the existing DRM schemes offers enough flexibility to please both customers and publishers. Time to innovate!
Just my 2 swedish cents
http://www.automatiq.se
1) VERY SMOOTH scrolling with no blurs, no matter how complicated the diagrams.
2) The ability to control the content with just your hands - no keyboard, mouse or touchpad - you should be able to hold it like a book and read it - maybe a tap on the lower right corner to advance to the next page and on the lower left corner to go to the previous page.
3) Eliminate the need to sit facing a vertical screen.
4) Minimize the dialogs. A book doesn't ask you if you want to save the file.
5) Make the text search work through voice recognition.
6) Hardly any boot-up time.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
I like RealBooks (you know the kind with PAPER, etc...) because...
*Major Reason: Looking at a monitor screen (any screen, LCD, CRT, whatever) for too long tends to make my eyes red and sore. My eyes dry out easily, and I find that I blink much less when looking at a computer screen, so that is going to always be a problem for me.
* I read VERY fast. (Approx 1,500 WPM). With a book, I can finish a page, switch to the next, turn the page, repeat, while ebooks generally need to be scrolled downwards, (or pageDown) which results in a slight delay while I find my place again.
*Spacial recognition: Partly due to the fast reading, I don't read word-at-a-time, I read paragraphs at a time, and the screens on handheld readers don't show ENOUGH text- I generally finish the entire window in less time than it takes to tell it.
*it's so much easier to just flip to where I was- I tend to remember that the bit I wanted to reread was "about halfway through, on the left hand side..." while ebooks make it hard to do the same... "my slider bar was about 2/3 down" can change depending on the size of the window you're reading it in...
All very personal reasons. I have a few ebooks on my PC, but unless I cannot find the same book in tangible form, I won't sit down and read them.
actually more then anything the internet has ruined the publishing market.
the way i see it there are 3 types of books
1. story (Fiction and non-fiction)
2. self-improvement (better sex through yoga, and how to make your garden greener, C++ programming)
3. reference books (history, dictionary, encyclopedia books)
how the web has ruined them
1. read reviews and small portions of the books (to see if you want to buy it)
2. forums. every hobby and skill has a forum for you to find out information on
3. web dictionarys, web encyclopedias, wiki, research published on web, etc.
i don't have any numbers to back me up however i would take a big guess and say between 1995-1998 book purchases for reference material and hobby/skills type books dropped.. ALOT.
the good stories you can wait out on until they become movies. so the only reason to read anything today on a paper format is for
1. astetics.. you like reading paper
2. "multiple monitors" keep different books open to different pages to have more infomation in fron t of you without having multiple monitors/windows open
3. you genuinly like to read. this is different for each person because frankly i can't read paper anymore.
Each day I have a fairly tedious journey to work on the Chicago El. The trip is made considerably more pleasant by being able to read eBooks on an old Handspring Visor. I prefer reading on paper (preferably hardback) rather than pokey old LCD, but the utility of the Visor wins over my preference for dead trees. The Visor holds about 10 books in memory, so I never have to worry about finishing a book mid-journey. Furthermore the software opens to the page I was last on when I switch on the PDA - I never lose track of where I am in the book. When the train is crowded I can easy read whilst straphanging, not so easy with a book.
Same deal when on holiday - I can relax on the beach, or half way up a mountain, or trapped in an airport with an eBook because I always have the PDA with me.
However, I have yet to pay for an eBook. I consider the price charged, and the DRM installed to be outrageous. Choosing instead to read authors who publish eBooks for free (Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, etc) or trawling through Project Gutenberg.
What I would want is for each dead tree book that I buy to come with a free eBook. That way I can read the book comfortably at home, but use the eBook when it is more convenient. I don't want DRM - I want text that I can port onto any electronic device I want.
Getting people to buy e-book readers when there are only a limited number of titles seems to be one of the most frequently memtioned stumbling blocks. From a corporate perspective, I think e-TEXTBOOKS might be the best way to create this market.
Students:
1) are usually more willing to try new technology,
2) have better eyes and are less likely to complain while current graphics capabilities improve (how many times did your Mom insist you needed more light to read by when you were perfectly comfortable),
3) are in a sufficiently controlled environment that the DRM issues could be addressed, and
4) frequently need texts which are in the public domain (at least English and History students.)
Once the paradigm becomes familiar to a significant market segment, it will naturally expand to other areas of the literary economy.
According to the article:
Nobody is going to get really hot for eBooks until the display technology supports full color, even if they don't need color for what they'll publish and read.
This seems false. High contrast, high resolution, ease of use, affordability -- these are the sorts of attributes of books that are important. I hardly ever read a book that's printed in color. Not that I mind color, but it's just not all that important. A good layout artist can do wonders in black & white. This is just as true with an ebook as a traditional one.
Why the hell isn't this thread about THAT article?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
There are any number of ways to protect against widespread piracy without screwing the user and crippling the interface and the ruining the reading experience.
One variation on this is Amazon's "Search Inside" function for books which allows full-text searching and the viewing of a limited number of pages for free.
This concept could be expanded to allow the purchaser to read everything and to print a limited number of complete hard copies and to cut and paste a reasonable percentage --say 5% of the entire book -- to be e-mailed, saved to a file etc.
Sure, this can be abused and it WILL be abused, but there are no 100% solutions and a compromise between reasonable DRM and the reader's rights and experience would more than please me and many other authors.
In fact, universal formats with flexible DRM rules have been created. In a previous life as CTO and founder of an Internet micropayments company, Pocketpass (I am no longer associated with that company), I invented just such a system called Tibanna
Tibanna integrated the MediaForgerun-time environment with the Pocketpass payment system.
Tibanna was free software that any individual could download and use. It took the content, the "digital wrapper" and the Pocketpass payment system and combined them into a single file that could be copied, shared and set free on the Internet without all the hassles still associated with premium content.
Tibanna even had a built in affiliate system that allowed fans of the content (book, music, any other digital deliverable) to "sign" the file, distribute it to a million of their closest friends then get a small percentage of the sale price -- set by the content creator -- if anybody bought it.
With Tibanna, the file became the store and I designed it to fit my needs as an author and creator with my needs as a reader and digital content consumer.
My intent was also to put control over the process in the hands of the individual musician, writer, digital creator and free it from the clutches of technological complication and corporate greediness that controls the sale and distribution of digital content. Tibanna would work just fine for corporate and mass wrapping of content, but I believe the independent creator deserves something to level the playing field.
Thanks to a group of untrustworthy investors, Pocketpass underwenta questionable reverse merger with a public shell, changed its name and -- as far as I can determine -- mucked everything up in the process.
I still believe in Tibanna and have just started a tribute site to keep the idea alive because it represents the middle ground that allows a creator to make money from their work without screwing the user in the process.
I have also started the Tibanna Blog to talk about the company, the product and how good ideas can go down the tubes when money guys with no vision take control.
I was gonna post up Cory's response as soon as I saw this on Slashdot, but glad somebody beat me to it. I love Gizmodo, but when it comes to knowing about how eBooks will or won't work, I'll take the word of the guy who's been very succesful releasing at least 3 of his books in eBook form, rather than the random technology blogger. I've met Cory, and the man knows what he's about, so when he talks about this stuff, I'm much more willing to give his words greater weight in this debate. It should be required reading for anyone who reads the original article.
"Two things are infinite: the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the first one." - Albert Einstein
No, its not. I can "own" a CD. I can "own" a book. We can argue that I don't really own it. But for all practical purposes, when I buy a CD, I own it.
You own an original CD, yes. But when you buy online, you only "own" a license to the data. Apple's iTMS is generous enough to let you burn CDs, but that CD is just a copy which you're not legally allowed to resell.
That's the analogy I'm trying to draw here. Paper books are to purchased CDs as e-books are to downloaded music. You do not have the same rights to electronic media as you do to physical media, and since all you "own" is a copy, not a physical object, there's no reason to expect them.
We are /. We know that for a tech to achieve mass commercial success you need one thing: pornography. Why is this tech any different?
One area of ebook/epub that is doing OK is "Erotic Romantic Fiction" among women. (Think romance novels with lots of sex.) http://loose-id.com/ http://ellorascave.com/
- When the display resolution is as good as paper.
- When the contrast of a display in all lighted conditions is as good as paper (current displays are better in total darkness).
- When battery life is not an issue at all - 24 or more hours on a charge, and less than 30 minutes to recharge.
- When you don't have to worry about breaking an eBook by dropping it or sitting on it.
- When replacement cost isn't an issue for your eBook reader.
- When using an eBook is as easy as grabbing a dead tree book off the bookshelf.
- When an eBook can be folded up or rolled up and stuffed in a pocket - like a paperback or magazine.
- When the pricing of eBook content reflects the significantly lower production and distribution costs involved.
And to sum it up with a simple, one-sentence rule:
eBooks will dominate the market as soon as a typical user doesn't hesitate to swat a fly with the eBook instead of the paper version.
That will indicate that eBook readers have finally met most of (if not all of) the criteria I set above.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I read a lot (really a lot) on public transport I have an hour long journey through some pretty dodgy parts. If i show i have nice shiney gadgets Im liable to get mugged. However no one is going to steal my tatty paperback + the criminal scum dont read.
In my case, the only thing they need to take off is that they should start selling the stupid things.
I regularly use my Tungsten T3 as an eBook reader, but the only content I can get is the one available in Project Gutenberg.
With a beautiful reader (TiBR) available, which allows to me to configure it in detail to suit my taste (landscape, full-screen, very-light-grey on very-dark-blue, bookmarks, and so on) I had read many thousand of pages of literary pleasure.
But while I could go on reading classics almost forever, now and then I would like to get a book from the last 50 years, or maybe a technical manual, and I would have no problem in paying for it. Even if the suckers want me to pay as much as the printed version costs.
Sadly, that option is nowhere to be seen.
I check them out on Amazon once. They cost as much as regular books and there aren't any books that I want to read. What's the point?
Some more professional examples. I just bailed on referreeing a paper for J. Chem Ed in which the most recent reference was Einstein, 1905- most of the rest were ~1850. (My small college library doesn't stock the references, and I didn't have time for a loan) But with time I could have gotten all of them. Our library here has been digitizing an illuminated Qu'ran from ~1500, and we'll do a ~1300 Book of Hours soon.
Do you have computer data 20 years old? Can you still read it?
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I don't think the ebook will ever catch on. People truly do love the way a book feels in their hands. I wonder if any studies have ever been done on this?
But I a few important factors haven't been covered, or have only implied.
1) E-books must be cheaper and more convenient than regular books. That means I can pay $18 for a hardcover (after discount from Amazon), or $8 for the E-book that offers similar functionality (i.e. I can loan it to a friend).
2) Major authors/publishing houses are willing to provide books, including non-technical books, in an e-book format. I've seen plenty of people peddling their "free" trash novels on the 'net (Cory Doctrow excluded from the this category), but the fact remains that publishers provide a valuable service to the reading public.
3) Perhaps most importantly, I think the cost of paper/distribution will have to rise considerably for e-books to really take off. That probably means some kind of economic disaster that I cannot totally forsee, such as war with China, sudden ecological change or a sudden, massive spike in oil costs. If the price of printing and distributing books rises high enough, it will drive people toward online distribution systems. And I imagine the trend will solidify for music and movies as well.
I think my third point would be the most likely to suddenly make e-books attractive, but I hope I never see that day come to pass.
It will take nothing less than the complete elimination of DRM.
People will not change formats unless the new format is more convenient than traditional books. DRM makes books inconvenient and eliminates the benefits of having electronic versions of books.
If you cannot cut and paste interesting passages and send them to your friends, why would you give up the smell of paper?
Why would you want 50 books in your pocket if you knew that you would have to pay a fee every time you accessed one of them?
Why would you want a dedicated device that did not allow you to move the book to your computer at home or at work (whenever and however many times you wanted)?
Why would you want a book that would become inaccessible to you the next you upgraded your (MS) OS or when the company that produced your reader went out of business?
Why would you want something that exposed you to Federal litigation if you tried to access it outside the bounds of a long unreadable license?
Why would you want a copy of a public domain work with an ominous copyright notice attached to it? (My copy of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica actually has a copyright notice attached to the Constitution of the United States of America).
There are numerous benefits to electronic formats, but the vast majority of those benefits are eliminated by DRM. I doubt anybody will switch until those benefits are allowed. The publishers need to find another business model... like editorial consulting or something where they would derive their revenue from helping authors and not monopolizing information. But I will definitely die of old age before that happens.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
1. Changing font size when your eyes get tired. ...
2. Lighted display for reading in the dark.
3. Built in dictionary and encyclopedia for instant reference lookups.
4. Highlighting w/o a highlighting pen.
5. Embedding your own notes.
6. Search.
7.
8. Profit! (sorry)
Bah!
1. The device itself should be free or nearly free.
2. The device should NOT be proprietary as it should accept books from all publishers.
3. The device should display one page at a type, NO scrolling to finish a page.
4. Backlighting.
5. No proprietary sealed-in batteries. Allow me the option of tossing in a few AAs if I forget to charge it.
6. The books HAVE to cost less than print books. I know most of the money goes to the seller, the publisher, and to the author. But since real books essentially last forever they will be a better bargain unless ebooks are cheaper.
7. No DRM. None. Nada. Zip.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
The problem isn't so much the asshat professors as it is the publishing company. Lets remember these asshat professors are some of the same people that have given us so much open source code and other benevolent contributions to society.
Textbook publishing is big business, the publishing companies just have to learn how to move to electronic publishing and make it work. It's just like the RIAA, their business model will NOT last forever. Sooner or later someone will provide electronic books, asshat professors and other authors will figure out that there is no need to pay publishing houses huge amounts of money, proofreaders and editors will become independant contracters that just get emailed copy, and the publishing industry as we know it will come to an end.
It's amazing to me how so many of the issues here on slashdot boil down to the same thing. The recording industry, movie industry, publishing industry and software industry have all sprung up over the last 100 or so years as middle men between the musicians, actors, authors, coders and the consumer. They server very little purpose. Now with the massive influence of the Internet all of these creative people are beginning to have no use for all of the managers and marketing people that are just taking a cut of the profits. Eventually, I expect most creative/IP type of products to be available on the net by the creators for a minimal fee.
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I buy eBooks from http://www.baen.com/. These are full novels, with no DRM, priced at $4 and $5 a book.
I read them on my PocketPC-based iPaq 1910, which I find quite usable. With the font antialiasing that the OS does, and the good contrast, I often actually prefer to read books this way. Not to mention that I can read in the dark in bed, while my wife sleeps.
In addition, I can bring a whole library with me, so that if I finish one book, I have a selection to continue with, without the weight additional books would cause.
With the Baen website, I can buy an eBook, and download it in formats suitable for PalmOS and PocketPC (I get both as my wife has a Palm PDA), as well as HTML and RTF formats. And if I lose my eBook somehow, I can go and download it again, as they are always available.
What we need to promote eBook usage is more publishers like Baen who "get it". For an eBook, no DRM is very important for me. I upgrade PDAs periodically (and my wife might want to read the book), so I want a format that will continue to work on each new PDA. I'd also prefer that the price be discounted some, as there are no (significant) production, distribution, and stocking costs. Baen gives me both of these, and I hope like hell that they succeed.
Just as iTunes has caused me to buy more music in the past couple of years than I ever have before, Baen is causing me to buy more books.
John
As for perils of the current system... *shrug* It's because it's easier to test people for facts rather than understanding. Safer too. It's easier to defend yourself against a student who claims you're discriminating against them on basis of gender, race, sexual orientation, or male endowment when you've got the test to show that they missed 37 of the 50 multiple choice questions than in a situation where you're having to explain that their class project demonstrated little original thought and didn't express itself clearly. That said, I'd prefer the project. Make people work together in arbitrary groups and have them grade each other in the end as to how much effort they each put in.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
While I agree with your basic premise (middle men going bye-bye) I will play devil's advocate and say that the reason we have middle men is marketing. If a consumer doesn't KNOW my book is out there, how will they find it? How will they know to look for other authors/artists/etc.? How will they be able to discern if the ebook they're thinking of downloading is wonderful prose or 5th-grade drivel? Look to the current content of the web, and how difficult it is for your mom to decide if the medical advice she got from imarealdoctorhonest.com is going to cure her or kill her. Middle men serve SOME purpose, yes?
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Two things:
First, this article blindly repeats the lie that for artists to get paid, they (or their publishers) need control over distribution. This isn't true; they just need to get paid. Control is one way to do so but there are others. For example, compulsory licenses pay the artists without giving them control over distribution.
(Cory Doctorow does this better than me, here. ObAttribution: This link was stolen from other Slashdot posts.)
Secondly, the article way overstates the importance of big publishers.
I'm convinced that the future lies with the small publishers, the ones that can't afford to pay a decent advance but will do a good job editing and make sure that their books are good. Those publishers will embrace DRM-less ebooks because they have nothing to lose. And someday, one of those DRM-less ebooks will be a huge best-seller, and that'll open the door for reasonable ebooks.
Until then, I'll just use Plucker to read free html ebooks like My Tokyo Death Cult on my Visor.