Slashdot Mirror
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?"
This is completely stupid. The reason I read books is to give my eyes a break FROM the screen, so I can sit outdoors and breath some fresh air. I read so that I'm not sitting in front of a monitor all day, bathing my eyes in radiation and making my eyeglass prescription worse by the second. I think THIS is the point e-book retailers are missing - most people would simply rather sit down outside on their front porch, or maybe just lie down in bed with a REAL book. That's why I never caught onto e-Books. Then again, you have the piracy protection issue. Most you can basically only download on ONE computer, and if something crashes, or you upgrade your mobo and have to reformat and reinstall - too bad. The e-book is tied to THAT particular computer, and you basically have built a new one. Theres $15 bucks down the drain. Theres another point - the price of e-books. You can't sell electronic data for the same price as a real physical object - albiet, prices HAVE gone down on them a bit, but not enough to entice me. Of course, it isn't the price that bothers me, its the first reason I listed.
"Potpourii doesn't taste as good as it smells." - Dark_Link2135
When we have nice portable epaper to read them on. If epaper really does require little power it could be solar powered.
Also the ebooks need to come in an open format, I personally think semantically correct (x)html would be perfect. Easily restyled to your personally preference.
Blind users would also benefit from that as they wouldn't need to wait ages for the book to come out on tape, assuming it does at all.
Firefox in my pocket is what i want.
"Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses." - Arthur C. Clarke.
Exactly. We need to cut down more trees and use the wood in ways (such as books) that will keep their carbon out of the atmosphere. Growing replacement trees will help suck up more CO2.
Do your bit to reduce greenhouse gases, cut down a tree! (And plant a new one.)
Most new paper pulp comes from tree farms, and has for decades.
-- Alastair
I had thought that being on an IBM site, it would actually have some insightful commentary and discussion on the issues facing ebooks.
Instead, it reiterated the same tired old points pro and con, totally missed the point of the Baen Free Library (and also didn't recognize that Webscriptions, its commercial counterpart, has been doing quite well for itself in e-sales alone), and went on to snark at the very notion of commercially-viable ebooks and talk about various things that don't have a darned thing to do with ebooks, like RFID tagging library books. Um, what?
And the discussion is the Standard Slashdot Ebook Advocacy Debate, whereupon people mostly or totally ignore the content of the article and instead argue about how ebooks suxx0r or r0xx0r.
And here I'd hoped I'd read something interesting. Oh well. Maybe next time.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
First, the article highlight a few common points about the current state of e-books, but then it degenerates into some kind of rant (although it has some good points too).
First, I have a few things to say about the "properties" of e-books.
Fine, that's true. That does not mean they are destined to be a failure. One just has to know the consequences of using one technology (ebooks) or another (paper).
I can carry more e-books in my PDA than I could possibly do with paper (about 20 books). I know perfectly that I'm forced to read from a tiny little screen, but that's something I know, that's the price I pay. If some day I wanted to read from a more "comfortable" medium, I could easily take a paper book from my home library. It's a matter of choices. It might be better for reading reference material, but that doesn't mean it's not workable.
This is related to the point above. You have to keep in mind that you cannot read a paper book either without power (cannot read in the dark). Okay, in the case of ebooks, you need TWO power sources.
He's right about that. That's why standards are important. We've got ASCII text as a las resort, though.
Cory Doctorow already talked about that. He's right on target. Most of the e-books I read are either:
No need to say anything else.
About books and readers, even if there are no commercially available readers, that does not mean people wouldn't use one. People do read their reference material from somewhere. It would be great if they made that "electronic paper" cheap enough, but even if that level cannot be achieved that doesn't mean ebooks are not good.
Then he proceeds to bash some (IMHO stupid) ideas from marketing people. The author's right about this. Most of these ideas are about trying to sell books to people that wouldn't want to read them (like a video-game-in-a-book).
E-books are probably not successful because of the points mentioned in the first part, especially the DRM stuff. I think they would be a success, even with mediocre reader devices if people realised they have a place, not exactly as the paper versions, but as something not quite the same, more versatile (I'm starting to sound like Mr. Doctorow...).
I think the show stopper is the DRM, that causes that more versatile, yet inferior thing to lose its versatility (thus making it an overall loser), with lack of good reader devices a not so important cause.
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