E-books, has your time come?

Recent announcements regarding electronic books have breathed fresh life into a seemingly moribund market. But some experts say e-books need to do more than move ink onto digital displays to go mainstream.

Sony announced on Monday that its Sony Reader will be sold at Borders bookstores for between $300 and $400 and texts will be available for download from the Sony Connect online store this summer.

And on Tuesday, Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury began offering titles for download off the Internet, presumably for reading on PCs. "Although it's not a big area now, it will be in the future," Bloomsbury Chairman Nigel Newton told Reuters. "We want to stake out our territory."

The news raises a question: Is there suddenly a market for what so far has been a novelty act? E-books, which can be downloaded to a special reading device or a traditional PC, got a major push in 2000 when Microsoft partnered with Barnes & Noble on an e-book store for Microsoft Reader software. Three years later, Barnes & Noble discontinued its e-book efforts, citing slow sales.

"Expectations were way out of line with the evolution of these new forms of reading," said Steve Potash, chief executive of Overdrive, a digital media clearinghouse that hosts about 150,000 digital books, music and video titles. "A few years ago we didn't have quite the selection" that's available now. However, major publishers, schools and universities, and public libraries have come around and are jumping on the bandwagon, he said.

But the relative sparsity of selections still vexes, as do other criticisms. Five years ago, in addition to the lack of titles, some customers complained about restrictions in e-book readers on printing, copying, exporting to other types of devices and sharing with other companies' e-book readers. Price, too, has been a factor.

"We don't see a lot of resistance to electronic books per se," said Gregory Newby, director of Project Gutenberg, the first electronic library, which offers 20,000 titles for free. "What we see are limiting factors in specialized readers and difficulty in finding good stuff to read." Plus, "publishers are charging the same amount for an electronic book as for a paper book."

There are other challenges too. With e-book readers, people may be able to store numerous texts in one small device and do things to make reading easier, such as changing type size, something that's impossible with print. But people also like to share books with others, resell them and hand them down to their children, he said.

"When you buy a book, you have it forever," Newby said. "With these electronic books, you often are prevented from doing those things that you can do with regular books. What happens when my device breaks?...Books aren't just words on a page. They are things you can trade, share and store for later."

To be compelling enough to trigger any kind of mass migration away from paper books, e-books will need to have compelling characteristics regular books don't, such as interactivity and mixed-media capabilities, Newby and others said.

Authors could write books that let people read alternate endings or that contain moving pictures and characters that speak aloud, he said. "This would be a pretty exciting change from plain old paper. People like interactive stuff online. Why wouldn't we see that in a book?"

[Jim Harmon]

Why I don't like ebooks

They're a pain to read, literally. I get eye strain much more quickly from a screen than I do from paper.

It's also why I don't use other devices like PDA's.

[PiratePete]

E-books = Free Books?

I had the opportunity to play with a friends Rocket E-book Reader some years ago. It was absolutely useless -- until we hacked it and put our own content on it.

Of course, once I showed him how to put his own material on it, he wanted it back, and I had been bitten by the bug.

I began using my Visor, and then my Pocket PC to enjoy ebooks on a regular basis. Every night, I could lie in bed with the lights out -- so as to not disturb my wife -- and read until I fell asleep.

With the electronic books, my device would turn off after 3 minutes of no page turning and it would remember where I was, so I could fall asleep and never have to reread a chapter to figure out where I left off. There were many instances where I woke up to find my Pocket PC had gotten lost amoung the sheets of my bed, but I was hooked.

I could never justify buying the the retail ebooks. The poor copy protection schemes and varying formats were too much hassle, so I turned to the 'elicit' free book trade. While you can download many new novels in text file format and easily convert them to your reader of choice, I instead discovered Project Gutenburg.

http://www.gutenberg.org/

Project Gutenberg is a vast repository of books that are no longer in copyright, and while they may be older novel they can still be a great read. I rediscovered many of the greatest science fiction and fantasy novels on Project Gutenberg - including one of my favourite authors, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

In short, buying the latest best seller better had better be a reasonable price to make this idea fly. Also, if they restrict the use of your own content, that would be a deal breaker for me.

[timtrice]

The price has got to go

I'm a programmer and I'm at my computer all the time. It absolutely amazes me how I'll have several books opened at once across my desk. I looked into purchasing e-books for what I needed but it was absolutely ridiculous. Amazon.com, Wiley, and other merchants charge the exact same price for the softcover! And then, of course, the restrictions. I will never buy an e-book until that prices come down. And I mean considerably. I understand the publishers and authors are entitled to make money, but when you cut the printing press out of it, how expensive is a book really? It makes them seem very greedy.

Tim Trice

[punterjoe]

sign me up - maybe not this instant...

I like the idea of ebook readers. There are many things I want to read once and not have cluttering up my shelves... or a landfill.
I think an e-reader could be the right medium for many things I either have on paper - like magazines,newspapers & bad fiction, and stuff like PDF manuals on CDRom - which often pose a catch-22. Maybe the "e" should be for ephemeral?
I'm not sure the price & usability have reached the point where I'll pull out my wallet, but I'm open to the idea of the ebook reader as expanding rather than replacing traditional print media.

[AlexBienek]

enewspapers ?

I think the point about ebooks is that their screen technology
must be as easy to read as paper, ie high contrast, daylight
viewable, high resolution, and low power. They should not be
seen as multimedia platforms competing with laptops and PDAs.
They must be robust, reliable and affordable.

One of the ideal uses for such a platform is the delivery of
the newspaper where there is no expectation to keep the content
long term or lend it to others in the future. It is also content
which benefits from being able to be searched and index to the
readers preferences.

Digital broadcast of newspaper content has measurable economic
advantages over printing, distributing, collecting and recycling
conventional paper newspapers.

Ten years ago I worked on a project called NewsPAD whose aim was
to deliver such a platform, but the screen technology just wasn't
available at that time. The most promising candidate, electrochromatic
ink has moved on some way in that time but I don't know if it is there
yet.

[mobileslate]

eBooks is not the right medium

While eBooks is a nice idea, I don't think having an inexpensive reader is the solution. If notebook computers could get lighter, thinner and more portable, that would be a better solution. Another angle is to use your mobile phone and marry a larger display substrate. Read more about my thoughts at: Mobile Digital Workflow

[gambalem]

Make the ebook in color and make it wireless

If you allow me to wireless receive and download information such as newspapers, magazines, blogs, and rss in color then I would buy it in a hearbeat.

Actually I would still buy it anyway because I can't stand keeping my pdf (whitepapers, etc) one one place on my desktop. If I had the ebook I would keep all those documents there as well as maybe shop for online books.

But as I said make it color and make it wireless and it would be a great product with a lot of potential. Of course color and wireless would make it heavier and shorten the battery life and it may end up looking more like a tablet (and it doesn't need to be a tablet to read ebooks). But if you could make it really look like and feel like a book with color and wireless then it would be something special.

[Niniri]

Ebooks and portability

Like Tyler/Pirate Pete, I thorgouhly enjoy the freebies at Project Gutenburg. I also am a reviewer of e-books from various 'small press'
type companies.

I use a Palm Lifedrive for both reading and alot of other things... I can use the *.pdb format as
well as using Adobe Reader for Palm--which converts my PDF e-books into palm format as well.

The ability to carry nearly an entire booksshelf on a CD (backup for my laptop) OR in a 1GB SD Flash memory card for my Lifedrive is a wonderful
thing!

I can read pretty much anything, anywhere and not have anybody bug me or look at me funny because I'm reading from a PDA, and not a paperback with a "funny" cover.

Gives me a bit more privacy and it weighs alot less than a backpack full of books--not to mention that I can use my Lifedrive for a good deal more than "just" reading e-books!

I'm already "in" the digital age...

Niniri

[Stormspace]

Low Price Reader

The solution to e-book adoption is a low priced reader. Use the video console game model and sell the reader under cost for $20.00 and make up the difference with the sale of the books. Who's going to purchase a 300.00 reader for a school age child? They'll more than likely spend that money on a computer for the child instead of an over priced e-reader. No, make the reader cheap and the books about the same price as they are now and it will take off.

The reader would have to support user content for books acquired from free sources like gutenburg, and an easy archiving mechanism would have to be in place as well. Removable media like SD or flash memory would fit the bill. And lastly restrictive DRM would have to be gone, or set up in a way that people could use the books exactly as they do today, lending or giving to friends and relatives, or even to resell.