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.

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"!

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.

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).

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