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When Will E-Books Become Mainstream?
An anonymous reader writes "IBM developerWorks is running an interesting article dicussing the difficulties faced by e-books and what it might take to help them to 'break out'. What are some other ways to give books a 21st-century facelift?"
When you can roll them up and stick them in a back pocket. When you can sit for six hours under a tree somewhere reading it and not worry about your battery. When you can browse them in a store and load them onto your reader without worrying about multiple formats. In short, when they're as easy to read, carry, buy and keep as a paperback book, and not until.
When will ebooks become mainstream?
Publishers will more quickly adopt ebooks once someone can not find almost every ebook ever released by forming a proper ebook google search.
If ebooks are copied this easily without punishment, publishers have no reason to push forward.
Is DRM the answer? (Well, I can't even suggest that on slashdot, can I?)
I buy programming books like candy. I've noticed that recently the quality of the printed texts are going way, way down. More errors in code, more misspellings, cheaper paper, etc. When you combine the decreasing quality with real books along with ebooks features of easy storage and searching, it'll happen.
I'll start buying E-books when the price of mainstream ones is substantially lower than their physical counterparts. Why bother taking risks with proprietary readers and formats when I know my trusty hardcover -- short of disaster -- will be readable 75 years from now?
On top of that, reading in front of a monitor at this point in time is not enjoyable. Maybe (hopefully) e-paper will change that.
For me, when I first heard about E-books I immediately thought "no cost of shipping, no middleman warehouse distribution, no physical cost to print/bind, no brick and mortar store paying electricity, rent, stocking risky books at a premium, they'll be dirt cheap!" I was wrong.
Frankly, the feel of actually holding a book one's hand, being able to carry it around, pick it up and put it down at leisure, is a lot of what makes books worth reading. Additionally, not having to worry about whether it will actually "work" (let alone trouble from any kind of protection that might prevent you from accessing it short of the language its written in), just makes books a no brainer. There's just something pleasant about having a stack of books (not to mention its easier on the eyes to have pages to flip), and I for one am perfectly happy with the current system and would not mind seeing it continue in perpetuity.
Using my Treo, I been reading one book after another on travel - Quicksilver, Harry Potter, Ulysses, etc, etc, etc. Good number of modern books and classics over at ereader.com.
But the main issue is in the reader. So far, they only work with Palm, Windows CE, and I think one cell phone device (not inluding PC readers, which is silly - I want a handheld unit). Most people aren't going to shell out $100 for a "ebook only" device - especially one that just works with cartridges or has a single purpose.
Most PDA's are a good example - if more phones go the PDA style route, that may work as well. Odds are, as we see more "cell phone/internet access devices", and more support on the INternet for these devices (ever try to surf slashdot.org or most sites with a cell phone web browser? Yeah. Pain.), perhaps ebooks will take off.
Until then, they're a side show, a novelty for people such as myself who don't mind looking at a little screen while I read about the Shaftoes and Waterhouses galavanting about the world.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
One word. Trees.
I have recently started reading a lot of ebooks on my Kyocera 7135 PDA/phone. The first was Burton's Vikram and the Vampire*, which I couldn't find in a print copy. I used iSilo as the reader. It turns out to be a wonderful way to read books. I now do maybe 50% of my reading on the Kyocera. I never thought I would find myself saying this, but I actually prefer it to paper.
*Great story, by the way. King Vikramiditya (Vikram for short) is tasked to carry a vampire a certain distance. Every time he speaks, the vampire goes back to its tree and he has to start again. So the meat of the book is a dozen or so stories told by the vampire in order to get Vikram to react by saying something out loud.
They simply don't work as well as books. Books don't have screen glare. Books don't have DRM. Books can last hundreds of years in the same piece, whereas formats come and go. Books don't need batteries or recharging. If you drop a book it'll be more or less fine, unless you drop it in a puddle or something. Ebooks just seem like a pain in the ass.
Your mileage may, as always, vary.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
I thought this - why do we need them? Im a huge reader, buying 6 or 7 new books from amazon every month and a huge library at home anyway. Then I discovered ebooks - 90% of my library was available in ebook format, the vast majority of what I wanted was on sale at ereader.com so I switched what I read most frequently over to ebooks, bought new stuff as ebooks, got a cheap ipaq as the reader and never looked back. I save roughly 30% on each new purchase, save loads of space on my shelves, and have instant delivery of the product.
I recently went on holiday, and usually I take 5 or 6 books for a 2 week period, and thats rarely enough. This way I was able to take 200 or 300 books, and save on my airline baggage allowance.
Will ebooks replace books? Maybe not for the vast majority of the public, but for me, tehy pretty much already have.
Hmm, adding to the above list, when you can forget your ebook at a bus stop / park bench / other location, and not worry about it because it only cost you $10 (or less). In other words, not for a long, long time.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
For example, I'm reading a hardcover novel at the moment that's about 600 pages long. It's so big and bulky (1.5 inches thick) that I can't easily carry it on trips in my laptop bag and it cost $25.95. Unfortunately it's not available in e-book format, and the books that are tend to be in proprietary formats, saddled with annoying DRM and don't cost much less than their paper versions.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
See the title. Plain and simple when they are put in an e-paper format I can see them being useful but till then they will be more a novelty or not as useful as paper (because of DRM)
why do we even need e-books?
Because on one device, you could carry all your books, instead of lugging hundreds of pounds around with you.
Very useful for those of us with huge college textbooks, for example.
Only when you can write notes and deface them. When they're not copy-protected, for sure. When you can lend them to your friends.
y /19.jpg
When you can publish material without censorship.
http://www.musicfanclubs.org/rage/pictures/imager
I like the fact that if I drop or get wet my book, it will survive. I don't need batteries, and I don't really worry about someone stealing my book.
you are stupid. do you realize how much more polution is created making electronics? trees used for paper are specially planted for that purpose. and once cut down, new ones are planted in their place. they don't cut the rainforest down to make books. they cut it down because it's blocking my view of your ugly wife being fucked by a horse.
People can read, right now and for free, 16,000 titles at Project Gutenberg http://gutenberg.org/ but they don't. Simply, people prefer to hold the parchment, crease the pages, and bend the spine. If they were going to pay money for ebooks, they would have started by reading the classics for free.
You also have to realize that some people enjoy holding dead trees in their hands. I know a few people who read *lots* of books and, to put it simply, they're complete Luddites about literature.
It's hard to get a mystical experience from reading some poorly written 16th century manuscript if it's on a computer screen or handheld, but if the same bad prose is printed on the fading yellow pages of a several centuries old stack of paper and wood it becomes a spiritual thing and no amount of poor editing can get in the way.
Do I sound cynical? I have friends who are always complaining that they want to read certain things but can never get around to checking the books out of the library. I point out that I could just email them a copy and they get indignant. It's for this reason that I've taken to buying physical copies of books if I really liked them.
Direct away from face when opening.
Well here becomes the issue- Why is this so? Think about the actual cost to develop and produce a very simple device that will display text. Forget crazy postscript formats. Plain text in a screen about five inches high by three across just like a real book. A couple hardware buttons for forward/back (with an ability to scroll like anything) and oh.... 16-32MB of onboard Flash memory. A display doesn't need to be backlit, as those $5 handheld video games (back when I was a kid...) that run on a couple AA's work very nicely.
So maybe we're all overthinking this. We assume an e-book reader needs to cost hundreds of dollars and be rather complicated. We assume it needs to be backlit and hold hundreds of books. Make them $20-$25 devides with a prev/next button that displays only text in an easy-to-read font adn we're set.
Think about it- Is this something that consumers are driving or manufacturers. Consumers don't need colour displays and touchscreens on their reader. That's why they're heavy. They need plain text input documents and to have a small device with a low-power processor (my XT (8086) and WordPerfect used to run circles around any modern 'tablet'-style e-book reader)- none of this PDF stuff.
So there's my comment on the reader. Now the other thing to ask is do 99.99% of consumers want e-books or is it publishers who want to save the coin and cut out the middle-man?
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
When I can buy an English version of this:
http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/333/C2658/
at my local electronics store for under a hundred dollars.
And when I can download non DRM'ed books for a buck each to read on it.
You're reading this, aren't you?
If the internet is competing with television in terms of total amount of time people spend recreationally, and the internet is mostly text, then the electronic text on the internet is utterly stomping traditional books in terms of total reader time.
I don't think e-books are going to take off to be anything other than niche. Why would people replace their books with the same thing, but digital? Long established technologies don't get overthrown by slight improvements, but radical departures. A three inch by four inch by one inch square can provide 40 or 50 hours of entertainment... why replace that with the an expensive, multi-step gizmo that provides functionally the same thing? That being said, people would accept their books being replaced by something different. That something different would appear to be the compellingness of news.bbc.co.uk, or slashdot, or any number of interesting sites and online texts. People are probably going to get wireless web-enabled phones, PDA's, and Palmtops, and will do a lot of reading through these devices, but they won't look like an electronic book any more than a PC resembles an electronic film projector.
The ______ Agenda
Once iPod supports PDF viewing, all Apple has to do is start selling eBook PDFs through the Store. Then it will become mainstream.
"Sufferin' succotash."
E-books can be physically uncomfortable to read (whether you're sitting at a desk looking at a monitor or squinting at a tiny PDA screen).
It doesn't matter how large the screen is, unless you need huge diagrams or maps. What matters for reading comfort is resolution and contrast. My Palm Tungsten E2 has about the same contrast than average book paper under average lighting and about 30-50% the resulution. On the other hand, a PDA is 100-200 grams, while a book can be 0.5-2 kg. It's physically uncomfortable to read books when you lie on your back, for example. And you won't get proper lighting then, while PDA screen is backlit. The author tried to mislead the readers about squinting - you don't squint because of a small screen, you squint because of small text. And who forces you to read in small font? With a PDA you can choose ANY font.
They're not portable if you have to read them on a desktop computer; if you read them on a laptop or PDA, you can't read if you run out of power.
You can't read an ordinary book if you run out of power too. I probably isn't be mistaken much when I estimate that about 80% of reading or more is done under artificial light. And if you have artificial light it usually means you have electricity, which means you can plug in your notebook or PDA.
There's a number of often incompatible formats that the files come in.
That doesn't affect those of us, who use compatible formats. It's like saying that cars have failed, because Model X is ugly or that Hollywood has failed because Actor Y can't act.
And the user's ability to access the book's content is often restricted by various digital rights management technologies.
Same as above. My ability is never restricted, because I simply don't accept (and will never accept) any DRM curses on my books. I prefer IRC (#bookwarez) to DRM. And again, this doesn't prove ebooks are bad.
The guy doesn't understand the reality of the issue and he is really at the kindergarten level. Just ignore him and he will go away. BTW, everyone who brings up flying cars is dangerous to society and should get a court order restraining him from speaking about future.
He is also clueless, because he thinks that electronic paper will greatly increase the popularity of ebooks. This is not the case, to put it mildly. Yes, in a decade or two we will have paper-thin computers that look better than paper. And at the same time ebooks will be mainstream. But the latter won't happen because of the former. Of course, someone who thinks that reflected light is somehow more pleasing to the eye than emitted light is better ignored (rather than asked to cover "technological issues").
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
This is the perfect example of the problem. It's like buying a $800 computer and then getting the 'well for $40 you can get a better video board, and another $40 and a bigger hard drive' and suddenly you have a $1200 computer.
I'm saying lets keep it simple. A forward, back, and 'mark' button. Hold the mark button to set a bookmark, press it to go back to it (maybe a confirmation for accidental purposes). Maybe even add the ability to add a few marks. All it needs is a byte, line, or page offset.
Write in the margins means you need a keyboard or input device. That takes up space, means you need to be able to hold it and type (it is portable). 'Searches' are unreasonable. When was the last time you could do a fuzzy quicksearch in the latest novel from Amazon or Chapters?
Assume the device is for _READING_. Reading a book or small manual. Okay maybe adding hyperlinks for manuals would make sense. But lets scrap pictures, postscript, searching, and adding notes to margins and you have a _VERY_ simple consumer-grade device.
Think of what a palmpilot does- we need a palm pilot or pocket organizer (which you can get for $50-$100 max)- But specialize it. Read plain text, we'll add hyperlinks, and basic navigation buttons. A simple device that is practical to use. If my father can't use it, it's not consumer-grade. The forward/back he'd get. The 'fuzzy search', not so much.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
I am with you, still like dead trees-just don't like the distribution and expense of normal bookstores, or even an amazon. Instead of an e book, I want a cheap printer that I can download an "ebook" to and it spits out a cheap bound normal sized paperback for me to read. A buck a book (joe cheap in other words) to the publisher/author plus some ink and paper on my end seems fair.
As for the paper, well, that's why we need legal industrial hemp...
My biggest issue with e-books is Im not going to waste all that battery on it. Ill just carry the book.
Aside from that... howabout white text on a black background? I dont want to read from a glowing screen.
If you look at the accession rate for Gutenberg, what you see is that ebooks have arrived and are thriving. All this stuff about they don't look and smell like real books is irrelevant. The success of ebooks is not about replacing real books, its democratisation of access to knowledge. It is actually very like open source software, which gives you equivalent access to skills and tools.
I was a kid in a small town with a minimal library. What I would have given for a Gutenberg DVD all those years ago! Or for the Debian or Mandrake DVD!