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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Ebook technology is backwards. The article pretty much is dead on (in summary:).
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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When you can publish material without censorship.
http://www.musicfanclubs.org/rage/pictures/imager
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
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!
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
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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