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German Book Publishers Cool To E-Book Market
Now that the Kindle is being actively marketed in many countries outside the US, reader
rsmiller510 sends in his piece up on DaniWeb about the skepticism in Germany about the whole e-book phenomenon. A major difference from the US book market is that in Germany, book prices are regulated in an effort to protect authors, publishers, and small booksellers. As a result, publishers don't issue electronic versions of their books until the paperback edition comes out, up to 2 years after the hardcover — and then they sell the e-book for the same price as the lowest-cost paperback. An article on e-books in Spiegel.de notes a survey taken recently for the Frankfurt Book Fair, which found that "only one in 12 Germans has a clear idea about what an e-book is, and seven out of 10 of them would prefer a printed version over a digital one." 65,000 e-books were sold in Germany in the first 6 months of 2009, vs. almost ten times that number bought per week in the US, in what is still a small niche of the overall book business.
...that hits all the same notes. E-books will take over the world, why are the German publishing houses sticking their heads in the sand, etc. I've thought about it quite a bit, since I have a strong personal preference for printed books, and have debated the topic with passionate advocates of e-books. I've come to a few conclusions:
1) The advantages that printed books have over e-books in terms of convenience will go away over the next 15 years. Limited resolution (200 ppi e-ink vs. 600+ ppi for print), limited battery life, bulk, storage capacity, etc., not to mention cost (not just direct, but transportation, storage, disposal, etc.), will all favor e-books in 15 years. Resolution (my particular nit) will probably take the longest, but it will happen.
2) I doubt a personal e-book 'reader' will last long in the marketplace. It's too big and bulky to be 'just' an e-book reader. Why not make it a web-browser? 95% percent of what you need to do that is there. E-mail? Terminal access? A cell phone with a bluetooth earbud? A movie watcher? It will become a general purpose computing device just like cell phones are becoming.
3) It won't succeed until an Apple-like company makes it so stunningly easy to use and manage that its advantages are clear. A cellphone and a smart cellphone are quite similar, so the idea of an iPhone/Treo (a general purpose computer that happens to be a cell phone) was not so hard to get accepted. A tablet-like device has no commonly existing parellel right now, and the existing examples are weak, to put it mildly. It will have to be wildly simple and pleasant to use...
4) Once most books are no longer printed, it remains an open question whether it will make censorship of ideas easier or harder. I haven't been able to come up with a convincing argument either way. DRM is also still an open question, although you can make a good argument that a DRMed device will fail in the marketplace. Maybe.
There will be a great e-book reader one day, but it won't be called that. It will be part of a package that can do far more.