In order to keep my wife from calling me a Luddite stuck in the 1800s I have acquired a Kindle. It will surprise no one that among the first books I’ve downloaded is Lord of The Rings. Being a middle-aged fuddy-duddy I mostly prefer the print edition–it’s just more enjoyable on a tactile level–but the ebook’s not bad. One thing that might improve it, though, would be links on character names. Oh, I already know how Celebrian is supposed to be pronounced, of course; but if I were reading the book for the first time and did not have that information already in my head, I’d like to be able to tap the screen and get an IPA rendering of the name.
That’s just me, though. What would you like to be able to do with ebooks that you cannot currently do?
The possibilities of ebooks are just beginning to be explored, but I think that there is a point of “too muchness” - books are not web pages. I don’t necessarily think it’s an advantage to put in every cross reference, lookup, background note and pronunciation guide possible. Especially not in fiction.
Something that precious few converted books have is a really good table of contents. It takes a lot of time to work up the HTML for all of the chapters and sub-chapters and headings of a complicated book, never mind links to and from tables and illustrations and all of that. I’ve never seen one with a working index.
I’ve been dilly-dallying through Jared Diamond’s book The World Until Yesterday, and I’ve given up on following the links to tables and pictures because the links “back” never go back to where I was.
Not that I don’t sympathize. I’ve produced an eBook myself. It was a pretty simple work of fiction with twelve chapters and a preface. Even that gave me conniptions as I tried to make Amazon’s KDP service play nice with my tagging.
I think the problem is the same publishers are trying to make a profit in both e-books and printed books.
The cost of “manufacturing” and distributing e-books is marginal. Publishers could slash the prices and still make a profit while greatly increasing sales. Let’s say a publisher makes a profit of five dollars on a twenty-five dollar hardcover. That publisher could sell that work as an e-book at six dollars and make the same five dollar profit per sale. But the publisher will sell ten thousand print copies at twenty-five dollars and a hundred thousand e-book copies at six dollars each.
So why not do this? Because if the publisher released a six dollar e-book edition it would kill the print edition sales. The publisher wouldn’t sell ten thousand print copies; he wouldn’t even sell a thousand. This doesn’t mean the publisher would be hurt financially - he’s making a much larger profit on the e-book sales.
But publishers have existing print divisions and they’re reluctant to abandon them. So they intentionally price their e-book editions high in order to keep their print editions competitive. They’ll price their e-book edition at twenty dollars instead of six. At twenty dollars for an e-book some people will still buy the print edition for twenty-five dollars. The publishers are handicapping e-book sales in order to keep print sales alive.
It even makes a limited financial sense. The e-book that was making a five dollar profit at a six dollar price is making a nineteen dollar profit at a twenty dollar price. The problem is that a work that would have sold a hundred thousand e-books at six dollars (for a total profit of $500,000) will only sell ten thousand e-books at twenty dollars (for a total profit of $190,000).
I think dynamic content will be increased. IOW, more pictures, audio, and clicking (tapping?). That’s because far more people will use the devices if they don’t have to read.
I have an edition of The Hobbit that includes a few audio excerpts read (or in one case, sung) by Professor Tolkien, as well as some reproductions of his illustrations.
One thing I absolutely love about the Kindle is that I can double-click on any word and get a dictionary definition. I tend to read a lot of historical fiction, and there can be a lot of obscure terms - different types of fabric, archaic use of common words, scientific terms, jargon, and such. I’ve always absorbed meaning through context, but having the precise definition available at my fingertips is utterly wonderful.
One thing I wish Kindle books were better at or did at all is the graphics. I want to be able to scale pictures. I want an easy to access Table of Contents with clearly labeled links to things like genealogical trees, maps, forewards, glossaries, and indices. I’d love if the screensaver would show the cover of the book I’m currently reading.
Oh yeah. I read a lot of books on my iPad in both the Kindle and iBooks apps. Maps are photos are always disappointing at best. I believe they are typically sized so that they’re displayed at their 100% size inline with the text. Click to get a better look and the detail falls apart.
Being able to zoom on maps or drawings would be good, the screens now should be able to handle the detail OK but adding a high-res scan of a map would make the file size a lot bigger which they may not want to do.
The Kobo line of e-readers does the cover-as-screensaver already, no reason Amazon couldn’t implement it.
I’d like it that if you bought a hard copy of the book, you could also get an e-book of it at a lower price. Wouldn’t apply to secondhand copies or copies bought at different companies, but it would be easy enough to do on Amazon. There are a few books I’d quite like the hard copies of because they include pictures that no technology will ever render as well as a printed copy (mainly history books), but they also have long sections where the hard copy isn’t necessary. Or books where I just like having the hard copy too, but in reality know that I’ll mostly read it on the e-reader.
I’d be much more likely to buy the hard copy if I could also get it as an e-reader version without paying almost the same amount again.
Amazon does the ‘discounted e-book if you bought the physical one’ option on occasion, with a very limited selection of titles. Try searching on “Matchbook” in the store search bar (via web browser, dunno if Kindles have something built in to look for this) and it should pull up that option.
An RIYL section at the end of the book that would show other books recommended if you liked that one. Links to buy directly would be awesome. Coupons for buying from link would be even smarter.
I’m still waiting for a horror writer to really take advantage of the medium in some interesting ways. Something along the lines of what Mark Z Danielewski did for House of Leaves with changing fonts and prints and directions could be done on a next level with suddenly adding video or background noises.
I know this is more for the reader itself, but:
A USB device with a small cord and two buttons-one for next page and the other for previous page. I love my Kindle Fire but I wish I had buttons that I could put anywhere, including on a protective cover or remotely, to change the pages. Finger swiping is nice but kind of physically awkward sometimes.
The main thing I’d like to see is a quick way to flip between footnotes, references, sidebars and end material and the place where they’re referenced in the text. Especially in books where the notes are all at the end of the chapter or book.
With a physical book, its fairly easy to just keep a finger on the place where you are flip back and forth. With ebooks, this is a lot more clumsy, and not many books seem to have taken the obvious step of making the references clickable linkes, and the notes clickable to take you back to the original place in the text.
Without actually changing the e-readers, I’d say that far better indexes/indexing, remove references to the printed pages and better tables of contents would be the best ‘easy’ fixes. I’ve bought too many reference e-books with indexes and tables of contents that had references to printed pages (useless on an e-book) and without hyperlinks to the actual places in the e-book.
On Kindle Touches, I think that hyperlinking the bookmarks/dogears would be a good thing- it’s really annoying to bookmark something and not be able to just click on the bookmark to get there.
Beyond that, changes to the e-readers that I’d advocate would be underlines/highlights in different colors- one for your own notes, one for passages highlighted by many people, and one for ‘official’ commentary/concordance notes.
Downloading an ebook from my local public library is a royal pain in the tuchis. There are all sorts of hoops to jump through in terms of downloading software and setting up accounts and in some cases, having to download the book on your home computer and transfer it to the eReader over a wire. The books that are (marginally) available for electronic borrowing are in various formats too, so it’s not a matter of getting set up once and then being good to go. (I’ve been investigating this as part of this science fiction project)
I don’t know why the situation developed like it has, and I don’t know if publishers even want to make it easier for libraries and their patrons to make use of ebooks, but right now, it’s really the pits.
Only semi-related - have they found a way to make it profitable/worthwhile to put out-of-print books back into “print” in an ebook-only format (or ebook with print-on-demand options)? When I used to work in a used book store, I was surprised to find that the hottest sections were self-help, religion, and cookbooks. They weren’t looking for bargains. They wanted to own the books.
I absolutely love the idea of a handheld page-turner device. I imagine a little clicker-thingie that would be easy to hold. It would probably be very easy to implement on an iPad or Android device.