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?"

Comments

When will they become mainstream?

[ctishman]

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.

Re:When will they become mainstream?

[nine-times]

It'd also help if they were cheap (the cost of the book minus the cost of materials, shipping, etc.) and you could still lend them to a friend without lending your actual device and/or account (i.e. no/loose DRM)

Re:When will they become mainstream?

[oxnyx]

I agree, personally I think the biggest thing prevent alot of e only stuff is the format of the files. When people feel in ten years the files will still be readable is when the first-world will start the true paperless office untill then we just created a faster way to copy lots of infomation fast onto paper.

Re:When will they become mainstream?

[TrentTheThief]

A few things will make the ebook rocket off:

First, display must be non-powered. That OLCD stuff already makes this possible. Either that or the plastic paper that was recently demo'ed.

Second, the battery must be long lasting. Lithium ion batteries will do the job.

The killer is going to be storage, of course, and DRM.

As mentioned if at least one other comment, one must be permitted to lend the "book" to a friend. Whether this means a one-off license that is part of an "uncopyable" file that transfers to the holder, or one that is keyed, but said key being transferable through some software means. I don't particularly care, but damn it, if I spend the money to buy the book, it's mine. It's future dispositon, whether I choose to retain the book for decades (yes, decades. I have a number of books purchased over 30 years ago.), whether I wish to give the book to a friend (permanently or a loan), or if I choose to resell the book, it's _mine" to do so as I wish, just as if I'd spent the money on a hardcopy book.

Personally, I think that a hardware book should have about the same formfactor as a paperback, that could allow you to load in several flash rams and able to store a couple of gigs, also loadable via USB would be nice. The management could be via computer for downloaded books, with the ability to "plug-in" a new purchase and add it to "permanent" storage later.

I don't know why there's such commotion over how to handle the distribution. Don't the publisher's read their own science fiction output? The "what form should it take" part has been hashed over and described for years.

The hardware is finally available. Now all we need is for some manufacturer and the publisher's to get together over something that is convenient to use and doesn't cost as much a damned laptop to own and operate.

For someone who reads a few thousand pages a month (like me), it needs to be cheap enough to own, and the books themselves should be significantly cheaper, too, what with the reduce production and distribution costs.

There is so much profit potential here that the mind boggles. The average large airport has three or four bookstores, and a handful of magazine/newstands? Can you imagine, instead, one having dozens of kiosks that can you with any of tens of thousands of titles on a flash ram? Think about it for a moment. There is only so much space in any transportation hub, and only so much time between flights. And, unfortunately, most bookstores in transportation centers carry the same new york times best-seller trash. Crap selections, crowded stores, and little time to shop.

If you could simple walk up to a little ATM sized kiosk, pick out a few titles, swipe a debit card and walk away with a ram card to put into a book, everyone would benefit. Hell, every 7/11 and Circle K in the world could be a bookstore.

Argghh,.... I wish I had the finances to get this launched. The group who gets this going is going to have more money that Bill Gates. There are literaly 10's of billions of dollars to be made with eBooks if only the right people would get their heads out of their asses.

Re:When will they become mainstream?

[secolactico]

But would book publishers be more willing to adopt the system than music publishers?

DRM is perhaps the biggest issue here, since technology alone won't solve it.

Almost nobody will want to publish without DRM and even then they'll be afraid the DRM scheme will be broken.

Re:When will they become mainstream?

[Catbeller]

Here's the book publishers' terror:

You, with your Apple iLibro, are reading the seventh book of the Harry Potter trilogy.

Here comes your wide-eyed nephew. "Can I read it, please please please?" He's holding up his iLibro eagerly.

"Sure", you say. Smiling, you tap on the "share me!" tab on the top of the iLibro's screen. Nephew's iLibro acks and receives the book in four seconds. MEEP.

Nephew flops down on the grass, eagerly reading his new copy of HP.

I've just made a publisher's heart skip four beats with this scene. THAT is why there are no eBook readers.

We may have to make our own.

Re:When will they become mainstream?

[TrentTheThief]

Ah, yes. I was just going to mention Baen. The man is a genius. Far from losing money, he has made his publishing company a force in the science fiction world through this policy.

The latest hardcover of the Honor Harrington serise, Honor's War, included a CD with the electronic version of every single novel written by David Weber for the "Honorverse," as well as all three of the Honorverse anthologies.

This isn't the action of someone worried about book piracy. Far from being worried, Baen has made proportionately made more books available in more formats that any other publisher. Baen has many of the top authors and uses those free novels as a come on to get you into reading the books.

I may someday cut that CD out of its holder to look through it and use the books. Right now, though, I spend 9-10 hours a day writing and really don't want to have to use a freaking computer to read for recreation. I carry two-three books in my bag to read on the subway and the bus. I normally read on book on the way in a nd one on the way home and have two more that I'm reading at home. If I could simply carry a _good_ wbook reader, one that could give me 35-40 hours of use between charging, that would be fantastic.

I noticed another post about $10 Palm III's. Maybe it's time to experiment with the html ebooks. Despite the small format, as long as I can page through it without stopping, it might work out.

Re:When will they become mainstream?

[bcrowell]

There is one mainstream publisher (ok, mainstream SF) that has a LARGE catalog of e-books: Baen
There are quite a few nonfiction publishers that release their books for free in digital form. See my sig for a few hundred examples of free books, many of which are also available in print.

Personally?

[LordOfYourPants]

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.

Re:Personally?

[earnest murderer]

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.

That's because the publisher looked at those exact same issues and said "I'll be rich"!

Huzzah for Dead Trees!

[SparksMcGee]

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.

why fix something that isn't broken?

[circletimessquare]

real books require no power, are cheap, have excellent contrast, great form factor, are durable, and last a long time

why do we even need e-books?

seriously, i'm no luddite, i just fail to see any compelling reason to replace something that isn't broken

Re:why fix something that isn't broken?

[salparadyse]

One word. Trees.

Re:why fix something that isn't broken?

[Richard_at_work]

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.

Re:why fix something that isn't broken?

[aktzin]

I agree with you that paper books are great as they are. Also the concern about paper is somewhat reduced by the re-planting of trees by lumber/paper companies. But in the "would be nice" category I can see the e-book benefits of a more compact form factor, convenient bookmarking, text search, built-in illumination and maybe someday lower cost.

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.

Re:why fix something that isn't broken?

[ceejayoz]

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.

Re:why fix something that isn't broken?

[Deliveranc3]

I have a palm Tungsten E and I love reading E-Books on it.

With the press of a button I can be back where I was, I can turn pages with one hand so I can hold onto the subway, it glows in the dark if I want (Also useful to find way to the washroom at night).

I can read about 50% of a book on one charge (Li-Ion no usb charge)

Before that I had a Palm IIIxe not the greatest but available for $15-30 bucks and can read two books on 2 AA batteries.

I have an increadible selection with me wherever I go and since I'd be carrying an organizer anyway it doesn't affect the form factor I have to carry at all.

Could only be happier if I had internet access to my entire collection.

I'd also like some better OCR software so I can propogate my love of books more easily :)

Re:why fix something that isn't broken?

[AJWM]

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.

They just don't get it...

[Dark_Link2135]

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.

I do this all the time

[Dark Paladin]

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.

How I read ebooks

[Henry V .009]

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.

Re:When?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I had noticed a few bugs in the code in a PHP book that I owned and discovered that there was no way to report them. The published errata list didn't list those flaws.

One problem I have with ebooks is that publishers want to take all the benefits and push all the negatives on the user, pretty much by cost-shifting to the user.

eBooks require proprietary programs or proprietary hardware, which the user is required to use.

Publishers get away from the costs having to print, package, store and distribute paper, they cut out the middle man of distributors and book sellers and yet, they still often charged 90% the cost of the paper book, and the cost of reading the ebook in a portable fashion is high, one has to own and use a laptop. Laptops still have run time issues, books don't.

Never.

[jb.hl.com]

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.

When they do what I want

[baomike]

An e-book should;
  Be light enough to read in bed.
  have a built in dictionary(highlight word, get
  def , in language of choice)
  have built in pronunciation, (highlight word or phrase and hear it, in language of choice)

Never?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

But that's what the $500 reader you have to haul around and babysit is for.

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.

Re:Never?

[QuestorTapes]

All the earlier observations in this thread are correct.

Really, the only reasons for electronic books (not e-books specifically) are the reasons software vendors offer them as free downloads: to reduce expense and speed up delivery. It makes sense for me to download the manual for a piece of hardware, or download developer documentation from Oracle. It's free, and it saves me the trouble of lugging a lot of heavy books.

For smaller books, fiction or books I'll want to read away from my computer, the advantages are almost all on the vendor's side of the transaction. They aren't much cheaper, and the problems of utility have already been noted.

So the question "when will e-books become mainstream" becomes "when will e-books offer the -utility- of paperbacks." And the answer becomes, "when various relatively small technical problems are solved, and when larger licensing and economic problems with the e-book business model are solved, so we can have cheaper e-books and -dirt- cheap readers."

Frankly, I see no way they will become mainstream until they can give away the readers like mousepads.

Re: Never?

[gidds]

Aha, the old Slashdot I-am-the-world argument...

Yes, I'm quite sure that Ebooks in their present form aren't suitable for you. But how can you assume that everyone has the same needs, restrictions, and requirements as you?

I, for example, have been reading much more off the screen of my 5mx than off paper for the last few years. In terms of convenience, for me, it beats paper hands down -- my 5mx lives in my trouser pocket, whereas paperbacks would have to be carried separately. I find the screen comfortable enough to read from, and my CF card holds the equivalent of about 3 bookcases full, so I'm unlikely to have read it all in the near future. I don't have to worry about bookmarks, and the backlight means I can read in bed with the lights off. Battery life isn't a problem -- even with the heavy use mine gets, a pair of AAs lasts 20-30 hours (probably more if I was only using it to read books). I can search, and cut'n'paste the text. I can even edit it (e.g. anglicising the spelling).

Of course, most people don't carry such a gadget around with them, so this method wouldn't apply to them; but it works very well for me, thank you.

Re:Never?

[arminw]

...Imagine....

All kinds of onerous DRM, all incompatible with each other. I can lend a book to a friend or sell it at a garage sale. How will this work with a DRM hobbled e-book? Until the publishers all get on the same page and get over their DRM paranoia, e-books will be toys that might get bought by a few wealthy gadget lovers in special stores, but not at the supermarket checkstand. I think we'll still see a lot of dead trees in the forseeable future.

ebooks are erehwon

[yagu]

Ebook technology is backwards. The article pretty much is dead on (in summary:).

1. physically uncomfortable to read
2. not portable
3. incompatible formats
4. drm

In addition, ebook readers don't feel like or smell like books. I saw Bill Gates give a presentation probably five years ago and he was hot for ebook technology. He described how ebooks would simulate the look and feel of a book to the extent that would be possible electronically. Virtually none of his listed features have appeared (e.g., the ability to "flip" a page with your finger as if it were a paper book).

As for the above listed reasons:

1. I purchased an early-on reader, a dedicated device. It was about 8x11 in size and had a four-level grey screen. I figured that would be good. It was horrible. Jagged fonts, poor contrast, after reading only a few pages I couldn't stand it any more. NOTE: the standard for acceptability is not readability, it's comfort! I returned that device the same day I received it.

   A year later I got the new and improved version, same size, higher resolution and in color! Virtually no improvement in the font rendering, I returned that unit the same day also.

2. Portability is a big issue. While I can't carry 40 or 50 books around in my briefcase at time (a big "feature" of ebooks), I don't generally finding a need to do so. But the books I do want to carry around (usually one or two at a time) I can easily do, and they're pretty much everywhere with me. For the same portability with ebooks you have to manage your portability to the extent the provider will even allow (which may not be much). Not a good start.
3. Incompatible formats may be one of the most maddening. I can buy books from Penguin, O'Reilly, heck, even Microsoft Press, and they're all compatible, i.e., I don't have to do anything to be able to read them anywhere. Of course they're quite inert, but that's a characteristic people are familiar and comfortable in books, they even expect that! If you're going to start extending into technology with ebooks, you better make the extensions interoperable. People partition themselves in camps in OS and computer technology. In books and ebook technology, that doesn't even make sense.
4. Last but not least, DRM. That was probably the second most irritating feature of the devices I've tried. I could get cool things like newspapers, magazines, etc. in ebook format, but how I could look at them and where and how many times was in the hands of the provider. I'm just not ready to go there. I hope nobody is (but I fear they do).

Price.

[ltwally]

What needs to change?

Well, beyond the fact that there aren't many companies putting out E-books as-yet...

• Price. The price for the few E-books that I come accross is too high for me to accept.

• Exportability. Who wants to buy an E-book (that costs nearly as much as the paper version) when it's digitally signed/encrypted so that it can't be exported into other formats? It may not bother you now, but a few years down the line it'd really piss you off if that copy of Harry Potter in .lit format couldn't be converted to a format that is still in existence. Hell, some E-books won't even let you print your copy out on paper. WTF is up with that...

Just my 2 cents. YMMV

When E-Paper is commercially availible

[Lord Haha]

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)

Re:When?

[BewireNomali]

I think a huge factor is generational. My nephew is nine, and even he prefers reading paper books to ebooks on my IPAQ.

Books are integral to human learning and we're extremely familiar with them; our earliest memories have books in them.

When we start reading bedtime stories to our nieces and nephews from tablets and electronic paper, then children will grow up knowing that as the way to be.

Because children growing up now are still being taught from and are used to reading books, it's going to take a long time. Maybe their children, or their grandchildren.

The paradigm changes when your kid reads from an online textbook via a ruggedized tablet at school that allows him totake notes that are stored online. The same tablet allows him to record the entire lecture so that he can listen to it over and over, answering any questions he might have in absentia. That same textbook, with the same notes, is available to him everywhere and anywhere on the web... so he doesn't need a paper copy of the book.

Again, it sounds like its a couple of generations down.

That's one of the really cool things about Japan. They're on new tech yesterday. I think that's where we're headed.

epaper and html

[StonedRat]

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.

For me, a useful e-book would be like...

[SpryGuy]

I've always decided that the main problem with eBooks was the form-factor and display.

Give me an "eBook" that's about the size and weight of a standard paperback. Open it up, and there should be electronic paper on both sides. Visible in normal light and bright sunshine. Minimum 300dpi resolution. The two facing screens should display type much like a paperback does, with a nice mat finish (no shiny stuff). And it should be augmented by touch sensitivity, so I can "change pages" with "gestures"... by swiping across the right hand page (top corner down towards center) in the standard "turning the page" gesture. There should be touch sensitive spots along the bottom that allow me to call up the table of contents, an index (that also allows searches), and tools to allow me to highlight and bookmark passages. When I open the eBook it should open to right where I left off. It should be water resistent, shock resistent, and the screen should be flexible enough that I don't have to worry about breaking the damn thing.

New books should be just a pluggable memory cartridge away. The memory cartridges should also store the bookmarks and highlights and "current position" so I can flip through several books at any time without losing my place in any one of them.

Once an eBook experience is like THAT, then watch out, they'll actually start to catch on. Or at the very least, *I* would suddenly be interested in owning one.

PSP Browser + Gutenburg Project

[JohnnyFnF]

The browser available with on the PSP makes a fantastic e-reader. Combine it with free books in available in html format from http://www.gutenberg.org/ and you've got all the classics you can want.

DRM.

[matt me]

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.

When you can publish material without censorship.
http://www.musicfanclubs.org/rage/pictures/imagery /19.jpg

Re:DRM.

[NanoGator]

"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."

Wow, I can't believe the lists of demands. It's like a hostage negotiation, heh.

Several years ago, I had a PocketPC. I downloaded a couple of e-books and found the experience quite enjoyable. The display and form factor were nice. It was so nice that I could hold the unit in one hand instead of using both to force it to stay open. The scroll wheel made page turning nice and easy. The backlit display killed the problem I have with orienting to the light. (i.e. my head casting a shadow over the book...) I could even highlight sentences of the book and bookmark them. (I like to go look up terms I don't understand, particularly when I read books written in other countries.) I was really intrigued by the idea of having a library of books in that unit. No more storage area for books.

What held me back was that there wasn't much selection. Today, well I'm PocketPC-less, but I've done a little rooting around for ebooks I'd be interested. I found more than I found a few years ago, but I'm not impressed. Maybe it's because I'm too picky, who knows? In any event, I think it's pretty sad.

For all the complaints about DRM and all that other crap, I think the problem is simply supply. Although I'd be willing to bet that the supply problem would ease if more people had palm devices. I don't see that getting rectified any time soon unless wireless internet becomes ubiquitous. Even then, it's a bit of hard sell to anybody who hasn't sat down and read an e-Book. I thought the idea was silly until I found a free one that I was interested in reading. Today I read books thinking "Dammit, I wish I still had my Pocket PC."

Re:E-ink, price, rights

[WinterSolstice]

I'd say that there are 2 hurdles to ebooks. An "ipod of ebook readers" won't fix either.

1) It needs to work everywhere. No proprietary devices, software, or code. Like HTML... or the printing press. Just print out the book if you like.

2) No DRM. That crap is killing everything, and making me consider moving to the bahamas or something. I wish I'd never heard of it. Well, it is hard to kill music with DRM, but easy to kill books. So we need something like HTML... or the printing press. Just print out the book if you like.

Basically, You're using the best eBook reader in the world right now. HTML is the best format for it. No DRM. No "serious" compatibility issues (ignoring FF/IE/Opera/Etc arguments). It is supported on more devices than I could possibly list. Tons of devices are capable of serving up HTML, even when they have no good reason to.

Oh, and I read about 3 ebooks a week. I use Project Gutenberg and HTML, or PDF when I have to. PDF sucks, but it has the best DRM/Useability tradeoff.

-WS

Re:Wrong Question -- MOD PARENT UP

[drdanny_orig]

Yep, this entire discussion is useless. Books have lasted for hundreds of years precisely because they're nearly perfect as is. If today you were to see the first book ever printed and assembled, you'd know exactly what it was for and how to use it. The probability of that being true for ebook hardware just a few decades from now aproaches zero. Jeez, there won't even be any batteries for them soon enough.

The fact that a few techno-geeks think that ebooks are better doesn't mean the technology will ever take off (or over or whatever).

75 years from now?

[oliverthered]

Most books are printed on wood pulp paper. Wood pulp paper is slightly acid (the process uses sulphur dioxide) so the book will start to crumble appart after a few years of usage, I'm not quite sure how quickly they degrade, but from some experience 75 years seems to be pushing it. (I've had books a lot younger fall appart like they were moth eaten).

Older books (pre UN drug treaty) were printed on hemp paper and can last hundreds of years without too many problems.

Never

[bcnstony]

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 weren't worng

[Uukrul]

On top of that, reading in front of a monitor at this point in time is not enjoyable.

New devices as Nokia 770 can make read more enjoyable with good 800x600 screens. ePaper may be the future, but not the present.

"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.

You can't say that on slashdot!
You have a lot of free (as in beer, as in speech) eBooks: Project Gutenberg, Wiki Books, or you can search it on Creative Commons. And there are a lot of books in HTML, PDF (without encription), txt format...

Dumb article, dumb discussion

[Robotech_Master]

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.

Besides the more correct answers...

[St. Arbirix]

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.

Back that up- Why Not?

[PhYrE2k2]

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.

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

Re:Back that up- Why Not?

[Catbeller]

As for power, make the flip side of the reader a solar cell panel. When the batteries run low, just flip it over for a couple of hours in bright light, and you're up to full power again.

Calculators have been photovoltaic for years, so there's no reason why an ebbok couldn't be.

As for backlighting an LED. Why not do the Viewmaster trick? Instead of a battery powered light source, why not make the back of the unit transparent? That way, you could simply hold it up, and any ambient room or outdoor light could shine through the LED panel.

Re:Back that up- Why Not?

[shmlco]

This is backwards. Part of the problem, from my perspective, is that people DON'T want yet another special-purpose battery-powered device to lug around. I think they'll become available when Apple enables the iBook store and they're readable on the new 3x5" multiMediaPod. (books, music, audiobooks, videos on one device)

And to answer another question, I want them. I want to be able to lug my entire library in my back pocket. I move and travel constantly, and physical books are a pain...

Re:Back that up- Why Not?

[Biogenesis]

I'm a consumer who doesn't want ebooks. Like basically every "e" thing it's removing the "feeling and soul" (for want of a more concrete concept) of owning a book. Why do people buy books when they can borrow them from a library for free already? Because there's a lot of emotion connected with actually owning and feeling a book that runs far beyond the information held within it.

I'd like to liken it to e-mail. When you recieve a hand written letter from someone you get a piece of paper that they have touched, with their smell on it, embodied with their character. The actual text is often very secondary from the piece of paper itself. Why do people keep love letters for example? Because the actually paper is more important, stores more emotion, than the information contained in the text.

All this reminds me of a story posted here long ago (I'm too lazy to look it up) that reffered to a study done about what happens when you lock engineers away in an office and only let them communicate with the outside world via electronic means. From memory depression and loss of productivity were high on the list of side effects.

Re:luddites!

[Jeff DeMaagd]

How about taking ADVANTAGE of the digital form

The biggest is the cost shift issue.

Only when ebooks are priced such that it reflects the fact that the costs are a lot lower to make them. That and there is an affordable large transflective display so I don't have to read on an emissive screen.

As it is, it costs more to buy 50 ebooks + some sort of reader than it does to just buy the 50 books. And those books are re-sellable. The ebook reader is too risky from a damage perspective, I can drop a book on concrete 2m up (or higher) and still read it, do you know anyone that is willing to drop their PDA from that height? So the low cost and durability of the e-book reader is important.

If an ebook costed 10% that of a paper book to reflect the significantly lowered costs, then I wouldn't be worried about resellability. I won't pay 90% of the cost of a paper book, in reality, that's a lot more expensive than the paper book because of the inability to resell it, and the requirement to own a reader. Searchability is nice but not worth the expense, the way things are currently priced.

The above is mostly for entertainment. For reference information, I currently just use the internet whenever possible.

How I read 200 books a year.

[queazocotal]

I used to do the dead tree thing. However, this all changed when I got a cheap small (486/75) laptop, weighing in at about 1Kg, and with a 8" screen. Before that I would occasionally read a book on a monitor, but it was rare. The laptop (now upgraded to a PII300 10" 1.1Kg) was light enough to hold in one hand while reading, and easy to read from in most lights. 80x25 suits for most occasions, whether I'm lying down with the laptop open on my cnest, or the laptop is lying on its side on the bed. Combined with a trivial script to take any format of ebook and throw out a html document hyperlinked so that names not occurring in the last 50 lines link back to the first definition, this makes it vastly easier for me to read than trees. I don't have to worry about storing the books. I can take the next book in a series, and use the back referencing hyperlinks to refresh memory. There is no hand strain due to the compromise between breaking the spine and reading easily. If I want to read at a greater distance, I just bump up the text size. Combined with a wireless mouse with a scrollwheel, this makes it easy to read in bed without having to have a hand outside the covers, or to read while excersizing. Oddly, a tablet might not suit quite so well. I find the keyboard at a right angle to the display to be very convenient when it comes to resting it on things. Power is an issue of course. If I was without power in many locations, my attitude may be different.

People already do most of their reading digitally

[cgenman]

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.

Re:E-ink, price, rights

[Overly Critical Guy]

Once iPod supports PDF viewing, all Apple has to do is start selling eBook PDFs through the Store. Then it will become mainstream.

You just don't know how to cook them properly

[danila]

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").

Cory doctorow said it all.

[Ernesto Alvarez]

Let's comment a little but about the article (Yes, I RTFA!).

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.

The reasons for ...[the ebooks commercial failure]... are numerous and pretty easy to rattle off:

        * 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).

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.

        * 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.

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.

        * There's a number of often incompatible formats that the files come in.

He's right about that. That's why standards are important. We've got ASCII text as a las resort, though.

        * And the user's ability to access the book's content is often restricted by various digital rights management technologies. (It's notable that the Baen Free Library, one of the more successful e-book outfits, gives away books that are DRM-free -- and, for that matter, free as in beer. I guess it's easy to be successful when you don't expect anyone to pay you!).

Cory Doctorow already talked about that. He's right on target. Most of the e-books I read are either:

1. Project Gutenberg books
2. Other public domain books
3. Downloaded from P2P apps

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.

Why focus on the negatives?

[mutewinter]

I've heard plenty of reasons why e-books "don't work."

Me, I don't think the e-book is a good format for fiction. If I want to read Lord of The Rings I don't want to be sitting at a PC or holding some device.

How about the positives:

-They can be published very fast.
I wrote an e-book, made the first sale within a week. In the traditional publishing world that doesn't happen.

-They have high profit margins for the writers:
The only middleman is the billing processor. Whats that, 3% or 4%? High profit margins for writers mean you can write a book that has a small audience and still pay your bills at the end of the month -- and maybe even write another.

-The can be easily updated
Forget 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th editions being measured in years. In the e-book world it can be a matter of days.

-Easier to make an interactive experience
In the e-book world the author can personally work with readers. For example, he or she could charge a price that would sound outrageous on Amazon or in Borders, but makes sense for a reader who needs in-depth and personal support. The author can tie the e-book into a premium/subscription website.

When I hear "e-book" I think positive. Very positive.

This is EXACTLY the problem

[PhYrE2k2]

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

personal e-publishing

[zogger]

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...

E-books addressed at OpenReader.org

[MikelJ]

It would appear that OpenReader.org is tackling the e-book problem as evidenced by David Rothman's blog at http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=3575/here>. For years they have been developing standards but have never come close to building an actual e-book reader. It looks like they finally got off the ground and are rolling something out in Q1 2006.

Eye strain

[timothykaine]

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.

Looking in the wrong places for the answer

[Budenny]

Here is the significance of ebooks. You are a small school, a small village in a developing country, a kid in a small town in a developed one. Libraries are expensive, buildings, heat, light, staffing. Shelving is expensive. However, in a small library you can have one reasonable server and half a dozen dumb terminals, and you can have, via Gutenberg and a hard drive, THE WORLDS SUPPLY of out of copyright books of all kinds available for your people. It applies today to Gutenberg for personal use: that kid can have a library of 10,000+ out of copyright titles. Books in other languages, books you simply cannot buy, that you may not have heard of, and if you could buy them, you couldn't store them.

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!

E-books for marketing purposes

[smartalix]

Many people, myself included, now offer free electronic versions of their books in an attempt to spread readership and increase hard-copy sales.

The intent is that many book lovers will buy the print version of a story they enjoyed, as well as reccommend the book to their non-Ebook friends to read.

To download a free copy my book, CYBERCHILD, go to www.smartalix.com/cyberchild.htm. A preview is also on that page so you can decide if it is your cup of tea.

It is available there in both PDF for Windows and Mobipocket PRC for Palm devices, so you can read it on your computer or your Palm-based PDA.