BTW, I do not think ebooks will replace paperbacks, just be an additional format in which text can be used. That lack of battery-need is good. I think ebooks have their advantages, too. I think some kind of compromise between the restrictive DRM stuff and being able to copy at will, will eventually be worked out, unless the corporations get RIAA like in their power and desire to suppress information. Which could happen.
Huh? Maybe one physical book is.
All of them? 600+ ebooks and reader weigh less than a pound.
My books are destroyed after being submerged in water.
For no cost at all I can read thousands of titles.
Do they now? Even in poorly lit environments? Laying in bed without a lamp nearby? Can you change the font size on those books?
And yet I’ve managed to wear out several books, lost others, had pages fall out, had a book or two eaten by pets. I have no simple way of backing up those books. If something happens to a physical book, I’m SOL and get to go buy another copy.
Ok, the key here is “useful to you”. That does not mean that “physical books are flat out more convenient”.
The OP was a little wild in his assertion, I believe. There is no reason that the two can’t coexist just as mp3’s and cd’s do. Even if there was a way to convert my entire physical library to electronic media, I’d still want to keep most of the physical books, but the convenience of electronic texts for someone who likes reading should not be overlooked. If one is more interested in feeling paper and sniffing dust and etc, then that’s a different story (ha!), but there is, in my opinion, no mystical quality to paper that makes it superior to anything else.
You have my dream job. Getting paid to read. Where can I sign up? Or audition? Or apply?
I don’t think printed books are going anywhere soon, but some newspapers are starting to switch over to digital format.
From Yahoo:
btw, I read about it in a printed newspaper at lunch.
Well - often they are, but the damn things are still priced like a hardback. Say, the hardback is 20.00, the ebook is 18.00. When the thing comes out in paperback at, say, 10.00, then the ebook price drops to, say, 9.00. Needless to say, I don’t buy ebooks when they’re still hardback priced!
Back to the OP: For ebooks to take over entirely:
Dedicated ebook readers won’t become ubiquitous until they’re a LOT cheaper, or ebooks themselves have a much greater price differential from their dead-tree counterparts. I’m not going to spend 100 bucks (or whatever) on an ebook reader, then that 9 bucks on each individual book. For the same 109 dollars, I could get 11 real paperback books. Yeah, in the long run, it’d be a bit cheaper to do reader+ebooks, but it takes a while to get there:
reader+10 books = 190 (vs 100 for dead-tree)
reader+20 books = 280 (vs 200 for dead-tree)
reader+30 books = 370 (vs 300 for dead-tree)
reader+40 books = 460 (vs 400 for dead-tree).
reader+100 books = 1000 (vs 1000 for dead-tree).
I love books, but even at a book a day that’s nearly 3 years of reading before break-even. Plus I can’t give the book to a friend afterward so there’s less bang for my book dollar.
If the readers were considerably cheaper (30 bucks or so), and ebooks were a lot cheaper (that 10 dollar paperback would have to go for a lot less)… then maybe they’d gain a bigger market share. Or Palm Pilots / Pocket PCs become as pervasive as cell phones… or cell phones with PDA features become more affordable. I don’t mind spending 200 bucks on something as versatile as a PDA, which can also be used as an ebook reader. But until that sort of thing happens, it’s still easier/cheaper to buy a paperback.
And that’s ignoring the fact that there’s a lot to be said for handling a book and flipping through it. Part of the pleasure of reading is holding the book in your hands.
That said: I have a Palm, with Palm’s ereader program (FAR superior to PDF for ebooks - faster, doesn’t crash, lets me make notes on the books) and I have a dozen or more books on the thing at any time. I always have something to read. I rarely buy dead-tree books any more. Only for the kids, or for the occasional gift. For myself, I get dead-trees from the library. There aren’t that many books that I expect to read and reread, and those I do, I get via ebook 99% of the time.
You must read Time Magazine. If not, you are saying the same thing Bill Gates said in this week’s Ten Questions piece.
I think the two innovations that will make this a reality is a more intuitive, or “natural” method of browsing a book - i.e. flipping the pages, and a presentation without glare. I don’t even know if it’s possible, but a screen that doesn’t double as a flashlight in a pinch will improve acceptance. I’d like to see a membrane or webbing of some sort that has the look and feel of paper, but can display text, images, etc. Doesn’t seem so far-fetched, if you really think about it. All you’d need to do is move protons (or electrons) around between two membranes - one clear, the other adjustable on a color scale for contrast. You’d need to upload content to it, or develope some method of data storage compatible with a paper-thin device - an offshoot of flash technology would do the trick, I think. I think you could embed bluetooth technology in this manner, along with some software so it could interface with your laptop. Or cerebral implants. 
I retain rights to this idea, by the way.
For the life of me, I can’t see how you are suggesting that people reading e-rotica presents any serious threat to print media.
Given the circumstances under which erotica is generally read, there’s no advantage in purchasing a stand-alone appliance to view your blue e-books on and pornography is an area where an e-book’s ephemerality and disposability is a selling point.
The format is fine for for erotica, even without a dedicated device.
A newspaper or a novel is something else again. I get most of my print news online, yeah, but it still makes more sense to drop $1 to have something convenient to read with my breakfast than to lug another piece of pricey hardware around to read the news. Literature? Forget it!
Fffft… I just saw your “BTW” that you don’t think books will be obsolete. Sorry, I thought that was what this silly thread was about. 
Man, you’re nuts. You haven’t “read” anything, you’ve just had it spoon fed to you. I’ve listened to a few books on long trips, and the experience is far, far inferior to reading a good book. It’s slow for one thing, and the nuances of a book are dependent on the narrator’s voice inflections. The whole immersion in a good story is lacking, as is the full use of your imagination to envision the story mentally. As for the ddistraction thing? Pfft. I have frequently sat in a crowded bar and read the book of my choice with no problem at all. The only distraction is people coming up to me and interrupting me “OMG! How can you read in a bar?”.
It’s the kind of thing you’ll never get rich doing unless you’re either a well-known celebrity with a distinctive voice, or are willing to put in years and years of voice work for other purposes. Even though I fall in the latter camp, I still have a long way to go before I get paid enough doing it to live on. I guess I really do it because I like to do it.
But if you’d like to try your hand (voice?) at it, you may want to check out Librivox. They publish public domain audiobooks read by volunteer readers. No audition is necessary, and you won’t get paid, but it’s a good way to get familiar with what it takes to read works (or parts of works, which is what many readers there do) aloud. And, if you look hard enough, you’ll find a couple of my recordings there too.
On preview, something I should address and that you may want to note, Dante, if you want to try reading audiobooks:
Hey, if he or she was listening to one of my recordings, shouldn’t that be, “you’ve just had it Spoons-fed to you?” 
Seriously, the inflections are important. Thats what my hard copy markup is for–as I do practice readings, I’m constantly marking up for pauses, questions, emphasis, and so on. I’ll go over parts of the item again and again, trying this way and that way, and marking up accordingly. By the time I’m ready to record, my hard copy is a mess of pencil marks and I’ve probably done seven or eight hours of practice for what ends up as a 45 minute recording. As you can tell, Dante, it requires a little dedication, but I find that it is worth it regardless of the pay (or lack of it).
This is right on the money. eBooks are never going to be dominant until there’s a compelling economic reason. I just looked at Mobipocket, which Amazon directed me to for eBooks, and looked up the prices for the top row of books they show. In every case but one, the actual paper book was cheaper than the eBook. On average, the real book was $1 cheaper than the eBook. And that’s at new prices. If you’re willing to buy used books (and why wouldn’t you be?), the price of a real book drops to about $5 to $10 less than the eBook. Add in the considerable cost of the reader, and it’s pretty clear why only a small subset of people have embraced eBooks.
I’ve been reading e-books on my Palm for years and not one of your points is valid.
Scanning? Hit the ‘search’ button.
How far are you through the text? There’s a little indicator bar, if that’s important to you (I generally turn it off).
Bookmarking? HAH! I jump around from program to program and automatically come back to the same place. And if I want, I can hit the ‘add bookmark’ button dozens of times if a particular passage is compelling.
Zoom: Adjustable fonts
Booting: hit the on-button. Not any appreciable drag.
Mark-up? Hit the ‘add bookmark’ button and write-- or copy a section, paste it into Memo and start writing in more depth.
My big plus is portability. I’ve always got my Palm with me anyway, so now I’ve always got a book or two as well. No more lugging around a bag everwhere – this thing fits in my pocket.
As for the DRM stuff, I generally borrow my ebooks from the Library. Yes. The Library. While sitting at home on my computer. They expire after 3 weeks, if I haven’t already finished them and deleted them from my gadget. Other books I’ve downloaded sit in zipped files on my hard drive. I suppose I can back them up to an optical disk format.
There are some drawbacks – images and charts are just too large to look at conveniently on a 7 cm screen. But if it’s truly necessary, many of the books I read can be printed up, or also looked at on a computer screen.
I don’t think paper books are going the way of the dodo, but don’t write off ebooks either. They’re viable.
I think some people have some mixed-up ideas. They’re thinking about “electronic books” in the same way people used to think about “horseless carriages”.
A typical book is just a big text file. It doesn’t need a dedicated “reader”, the reader can be any machine that can display html. You don’t need to “store” your “ebooks” on a “cartridge”, you don’t need to store anything. The book is just a big web page. The future of ebooks isn’t somehow mimicing a book but Now With Electronics!
Of course there won’t be a need to copy your paper books to electronic format. Not gonna happen. Except if you want to read “David Copperfield” again you can either go to the shelf and pull your paper copy out, or you can go to the Project Gutenberg website, or some futuristic 2009 version of Project Gutenberg and read “David Copperfield” on any web enabled device.
It is precisely old, out of date, out of publication works that make the ebook format so valuable. There’s no need to keep a physical inventory of paper books out there in the hope that someday someone will for some reason want to read one. You just have it hosted somewhere, or a couple dozen somewheres. Sure, you can “download” the book and “save” it on your local hard drive, but why would you?
Ubiquitous wireless internet is going to change the whole paradigm of what it means to “own” a “copy” of a work. Paying for “copies” of music or books will be outdated as hiring a monk to produce a copy of Aristotle’s Poetics by hand calligraphy. Most likely the eventual solution is to charge a flat monthly fee as part of your ISP charge that entitles you to unlimited media. Unlimited movies and TV (like all the “free” movies on cable TV once you’ve paid the cable bill), unlimited music (like the “free” music on the radio, except on demand), unlimited news and magazines (like the free newpaper websites of today), unlimited books. And authors will be paid out of the collected fees by some sort of usage tracking. Of course there will probably also be premium content that you’ll have to pay extra for…new movies, live telecast events, or other time-sensitive content where people are willing to pay a small amount to watch the event live (say, the Superbowl) but only a few are interested in after a week.
But of course, paper books won’t go away soon, any more than TV killed the movie theatre or radio. But eventually the idea of buying a paper novel will seem as quaint as sending a telegram. If you want a paper book you will be able to just print the damn thing out on whatever paper stock you like. And of course, there will always be a market for books as art objects.
Check out Ereader (www.ereader.com), which used to be Palm Digital Media, and before that was called Peanut Press. Their “list” prices are about the same but they do a twice-weekly newsletter that includes a code that gives you a discount of 10% on anything. I compared the paperback dead-tree price of one recent purchase at Amazon, to the Mobipocket price, to the Ereader-with-discount, and Ereader (eReader?) came out cheaper.
That’s where we buy all our ebooks.
Ebooks from the library are great though ours doesn’t have a good selection yet, and they’re all PDFs (which require adobe reader… on my Palm, that’s slow and klunky and the files take up a lot of room, and it crashes periodically).
I don’t think I’d use the term “nuts” at all. Yeah, the experience is dependent upon the reader’s inflections etc. (I like listening to mysteries etc. while driving and some readers, you can’t tell who’s speaking… others such as Barbara Rosenblat are fantastic and I’ve chosen books specifically because she was the reader). But audiobooks fill a terrific niche. Maybe not the bar-reading scene -and yeah, I can’t immerse myself the way I can in a dead-tree book (the traffic cops would rather I didn’t, for sure!), but for the situations kawaiitentaclebeast describes, audiobooks can be terrific! You have to use your imagination to visualize scenes, people etc. just as much with an audiobook as with a paper version. Slow? Yeah, though that can help me savor a book in a way that zipping through it quickly doesn’t allow. Oh, and with an audiobook, it’s much harder to flip to the last 10 pages and find out Who Done It, something I’m frequently guilty of! :o Anyway - though audiobooks will never replace other forms, they fill a niche quite nicely.
That has happened (here for instance), and people still aren’t interested. Well, $200 with a 2 year commitment, IIRC.
Mmmm. I’ve consumed quite a few books on tape, and I like them, for what they are. Used to be in the habit of listening in bed. (Not too practical with a shared bed, though.)
Even then, though – the type of book that I consider okay for the “book on tape” thing is vastly different from what I would consider reading material. Keyriiist— I listened to a few Star Wars expanded universe “novels” and Clive Cussler and James Patterson works. I would not really consider reading this sort of material, because the writing is so piss-poor. Engages a different part of the brain or something as a spoken narrative, though. I have no idea what it is about a book-on-“tape” that makes sub-par writing tolerable.
On the other hand, I could only find Umberto Eco’s Sign, Symbol, Code in audio-book form. I really wanted to read it, but couldn’t find the book, and settled for the audiobook version. Very simple text, for a book on semiotics, but was it ever hard to take in spoken word? I had to keep “re-winding” again and again, where reading the printed page would have allowed me to absorb the same text effortlessly in a quarter of the time. Ech.
I listened to a lot of Books on Tape when I commuted 1.5 hours to work each way every day, and for my 2 hour jaunts to the ski slopes. I’ve listened to all sorts of books, but I do find that, for repeated listening, nonfiction is best. Also, there’s a very different dimension to listening to poetic epics – which were meant to be heard – rather than reading them. I just finished re-listening to The Iliad today on CD. I’ve got The Odyssey, too, and Beowulf, The Argonautica, Gilgamesh, asnd others.
Convenience is a YMMV sort of thing, though. What I find convenient varies wildly from what another person finds convenient. Sort of like “attractive”. For totally random example, I find that services like Netflix are actually a gigantic pain in the behind for me. They just fail to work well with my life, but I have friends and relatives who find them the single most convenient thing they’ve discovered in the last decade.
I was talking about how easy and natural these things are with paper books, not saying that they can’t be done more clumsily with something like a Palm. Your way sounds like a lot of stylus/button activity, and a lot of learning how to use the UI. Whereas books come with no instruction manual, because they are so easy to use (and I suppose because if they weren’t, you wouldn’t know to use the manual either ).
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. - Karl Marx
No, ebooks won’t totally replace paper, but they will make some things better.
If I could get all my newspapers and periodicals on a comfortable to read e-book, I’d dump the paper subscriptions in a heartbeat. Especially if there was an easy index of contents for long term use. Occasionally used technical reference books, the same thing. Recipe books, find me one that can withstand a chili covered spoon, and I’m in.
General reference books, and personal reading, give me paper. When I need to look a word up in a dictionary, I usually end up randomly scanning some other pages, just to find interesting words. The same thing with an encyclopedia or an atlas. And I’ve yet to find an ebook reader that makes me want to curl up on the sofa with a mug of hot chocolate.
Heck, I read electronic components catalogs all day. Every single one of them is available online, but I still have over 8’ of shelf space filled with them, because it’s so much faster to find and compare between them, in paper form.