Bubble Bursts for e-Books 281
Reuters has a piece noting that ebooks haven't lived up to the hype. Give it a few years, and publishers willing to issue non-DRM ebooks, and reading devices that go for days without being recharged and are as light as a paperback, and then we'll see...
price. (Score:5, Insightful)
e-Books (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe what they should start doing if they want people to get into reading e-books is including a copy of the book (like a lot of technical books do currently) on mini-cd or something. The more and more people are exposed to it, the more likely they will start to like reading books electronicaly. Or, you just wasted a lot of money and no one will ever like reading ebooks.
paper vs. electronics (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't help the fact that, for me, a book still feels better then an electronic piece to read from.
Nothing can beat the feeling I get from sitting in a corner of my livingroom with a little light and holding and reading a good book.
For one, the smell a book can have is something i'll never get out of a piece of electronics.
I remember reading about a newwspaper, printed on what feels like real paper, but is in fact something electronic that can be reused a couple of times.
How nice would it be to have an empty book of let's say 400 pages, you plug it your computer and download a couple of chapters of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy on it. When done, download the next part.
eBooks...an unneccessary technology (Score:2, Insightful)
Here is why:
1 - eBooks aren't cheap. The reader is expensive, and the electronic books aren't significantly cheaper than paper books.
2 - It is actually more difficult for most people to read off of a computer screen than it is to read printed text. (can anyone back this up with research?)
3 - Batteries die, books don't need batteries.
Granted, it's easier to carry around one eBook with 100 titles on it than 100 physical books, but realistically, who needs that many books in one sitting?
The makers of the eBook seem to be forgetting that in order for a product to succeed it must solve a problem and be cost efficient. The eBook is neither of those two things.
No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it any wonder the market is dead? Who wants a book that only works on their desktop but not their palm pilot? Or on their pocketpc or not their Mac? Or works everywhere but has a dreadful selection of titles? Or only runs through a reader that is a piece of junk (e.g. MS Reader)?
But does that mean no one is interested? Of course not. Wander into a IRC book warez channel or a ebooks newsgroup and you'll find tens of thousands of books, lovingly hand scanned in for trading and available in formats such as
I do not believe that it is beyond the realms of probability that an XML format with some form of DRM could be produced. Until these vendors pull their fingers out of their arses and produce such an open format, they can look forward to their beloved market shrivelling on the vine.
Re:price. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hardly surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the problem I have had with the e-books as presented by the industry since day one. Cost of the books themselves. Why the hell does the ebook version [amazon.com] cost only a buck less than the paperback version [amazon.com]? It only costs a buck to print and ship to distributors? That's friggin news to me! If the Ebooks were reasonably priced for the lack of a physical thing that you can hold in your hands, like say around $2.50 per instead of $7 per, then there would have been a lot more interest than there has been so far.
In fact, there's been so little interest in Ebooks, I find the title of the article laughable. The bubble burst? What bubble? It was never there to begin with. The publishing industry is terrified of ebooks and never wanted them to succeed to begin with, which probably explains the asinine pricing model. A lot of the bigger publishers refused to even consider ebooks at all. A lot of the books I read on my palm come from either public domain sources like Project Gutenberg [promo.net], or one of the few tree publishers that does seem to "get it", Baen Books [baen.com]. They even have a free library of a lot of their published stuff, a download from which of a book by David Weber eventually saw me going out and buying several of his books. They also have an interesting "webscription" system, which I am thinking about trying for a few months. Could be good. Unfortunately, they seem the exception rather than the rule when it comes to publishers and ebooks.
Re:No wonder (Score:1, Insightful)
None of it is true, of course. Until Joe Average can download Average Movie/Book/Game/Song RIGHT NOW for free, or at least in less time than it takes to just buy it from the site that everybody knows about anyway, actual levels of copying and piracy will continue to be exaggerated at best, and bullshit at worst.
And no, Joe Average is not going to be able to find #warezmyassoff on some obscure IRC server and download whatever he wants. It just ain't happenin' now, and it ain't happenin' later.
Re:Yay! (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah yes... but I can change the fontsize and typeface to something I have less trouble with... you can't with a paper book... you're stuck with having to find your title in the large print specialist section... and with having to wait several months or years after the original version came out
Also a paper book is useless for a blind person... whereas an open format e-book can be fed through a text to speech synthesizer
Re:Quote by Isaac Asimov (Score:3, Insightful)
But it's true even at the individual level. I routinely carry ten ebooks around in my palmtop. The palmtop I carry anyway for it's organization features. I'd need a big backpack and a strength building program to carry ten paper books.
As for minimum technology for maximum interaction, how have newspapers done against TV?
Answer: TV practically destroyed them. Newspapers still exist, but they have nowhere near the ubiquity and penetration they had prior to TV. Yet TV is a lot of technology for something that gives very little interaction. Moreover, TV proves the points that people don't really care so much for the paper experience that they wouldn't switch, and that they'll pay money (even a lot of money) for a viewer.
Nor is that the only example of people moving from paper to electronic. Have you used the web lately? Did you know that even a decade ago the only way to get timely information was paper journals? That product information was mailed to you in paper pamphlets?
The web demolished entire printing industries. And yet the web has all the same downsides that Asimov pointed out.
Someone will say, "yea, but the web improved immediacy." That's true, but that wasn't the only reason, nor even the primary reason. It won, largely, because of economics. Let's illustrate.
Someone here earlier said that a paperback cost about $1.20 to print, so there wasn't much savings in ebooks. He forgot about warehousing and shipping and such, but let's just call it $1.20 and presume the new costs of ebooks are a wash (they aren't, it's not even close, but we'll presume that anyway). If the publisher can sell the ebook for the same money as a regular book, that means they pull in another $1.20 per book. That represents a very substantial jump in profit.
Trust me, if they can figure out a way to get us to buy ebooks they will do it. There's more money to be made. And with DRM, they can substantially close the borrow and resell hole.
To go mainstream they'll have to subsidize the readers (or palmtops will have to be more ubiquitous) but ebook-capable devices can currently be produced for under $20 if they care to do it ... and the price drops every year. There is an inflection point coming; it will almost certainly happen before 2010.
The economics of paper books will become noncompetitive with ebooks within the next decade. And when that happens, the market will flip.
It's already happened in a bunch of cases. I don't know about you, but I used to have a bookshelf full of references so I could get my work done. Today I have only a couple of books, and they're more tutorial-style than reference. I get virtually all reference material from electronic stuff. Virtually all help material from electronic stuff too. In fact, most software publishers provide practically no paper documentation these days.
In many respects I consider this a step down in usability, but distribution costs dominated the equation from the point of view of the producers, and since we didn't have a choice in the matter we got these things rammed down our throats.
You will have to use ebooks whether you like it or not. It won't happen this year, or next, but by the middle of the next decade it will be difficult to find many texts in paper format.
This change is going to have some really widespread impacts. Consider what this is going to do to the bookstore, for instance. We probably won't have "bookstores" so much as "book kiosks." Not the same buying experience, and a big step down IMO, but those kiosks would be able to sell you almost any book that has ever been published and cost vastly less than a big storefront.
It's a brave new world.
Labor theory of value (Score:2, Insightful)
My experience is that labor is the biggest single cost in a product.
Labor is the entire cost [colorado.edu] of a product; supply and demand determine the value of the labor used to develop, replicate, and deliver a given product. You're still correct in that Amdahl's Law [ic.ac.uk] limits the effect that labor reductions in replication and delivery can have on the product's final price.
Article Misses the Point (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course ebooks aren't selling in the same scale as paperbacks! We're still in the age of the early adopter. The tech isn't yet mature enough to attract the average reader. That doesn't mean it won't ever be. The article itself admits that the number of buyers of ebooks is increasing, just not as fast as they'd hoped.
Just let the price of reading solutions fall by a factor of ten or so while the resolution and clarity of available screens approach that of paper and the same sources that are bemoaning how few people buy ebooks will be stunned at how many people are.
Re:Hardly surprising (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you ever done a search in an ebook? It's a lot easier than flipping through a book.
Re:BN.com already bears almost all those costs (Score:2, Insightful)
That, is a relative phrase. Low prices according to whom? Amazon.com's 10% off (look mah, no sales tax!) hardly counts as a big deal.
I perfer to get my books from half.com, I can afford them from there.
Re:Hardly surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
Ebooks failed because they were a concept pushed by publishers. They wanted to make a profit so they charged some money for their e-books. However that price bears little relation to any costs they have to make other than the cost associated with distributing the e-book (i.e. almost nothing). Then they wanted to protect their non existing investment and put inconvenient DRM shit on the e-books. Sadly, vendors of reader software/hardware all tried to push their proprietary formats so all of them lost and the e-book market never really emerged. Other than DRM there is little technical reason to introduce new formats. HTML + CSS was invented for this kind of thing.
The new e-book format is actually already out there. You can just browse the web and read news, magazines, technical documentation, etc. in a special purpose program called a web-browser. Soon you will be able to do this on mobile phones as well (3rd generation networks are being deployed as we speak). The e-book of the future will use this network (or future versions of it) and combine a comfortable screen with nice browser software. People will just publish stuff on their websites (some for free, some for profit). Rather than mass printing and distributing books you will just tell a commercial printer to print a book when you actually need a hardcopy.
We're in a transition period right now where all this is technically feasible but not really convenient yet. Printed material has a higher dpi and the convenience of not causing so much eye strain and being available if you go out of reach of the mobile phone network. This will not remain the case forever.