The web browser and games aren’t where the cost is. The cost is in the hardware design of electronic books. Even if you stripped them down the traditional design would still cost over a hundred dollars (you are still going to need the memory and processor as well as the display and controls)…and it’s still going to be subject to damage and theft. Until you can get the unit costs down to a level where breaking the thing as well as stealing the thing is not a major concern electronic books are never going to be more than a niche market.
Current high school and college students are becoming more and more comfortable with electronic texts. They read articles, essays, and books on their computer screens all the time. Many current college text books offer their entire text online, as well as additional web-only information and links. I was teaching a high school class last year, and most of my students had two or three years of computer programming behind them and can’t really remember a time Pre-PC.
My point is that soon, all of these complaints that people like books, people can’t stand the eyestrain, people don’t like to read online, are all going to be moot points. It might not happen tomorrow or next year, and I’m not saying that books are going to be done away with entirely (they won’t be), but I am saying that most of the problems listed so far aren’t really problems for upcoming generations and tomorrow’s consumers.
I read ebooks on my iPhone and laptop, and I don’t miss “real” books at all. Especially since I can curl up in bed with my iPhone with the light out and quietly read deep into the night.
In my town, the awkwardly long-named Bishoku Bishu Danran Issaku retaurant already has an ordering system similar to what you suggest in place. The menus are still large laminated paper books, but seeing as the menus are lavish full-color jobs complete with well-staged photographs of the more popular dishes and alcohols, I can see the reluctance to discard them. However, next to the price for each item on the menu is a 3-digit number. When you decide what you want, you grab the little remote on each table, punch in the number, hit enter, the remote asks you how many you want, you put in a number from 1-99, hit enter, the order is sent to the kitchen, and is finally brought to your booth by a server. The system is really convenient as the restaurant is an izakaya-style deal, so the food and drinks are generally ordered as you eat them, rather than all at once.
While the system doesn’t include all of the features you figured for your system, it does include a section that lists the weekly/monthly/seasonal specials, another section that gives the running total as well as a history of what has been ordered, etc. Considering the fact that my town, by Japanese standards, is pretty podunk, I was fairly impressed that a locally-owned and operated restaurant would invest in a system like that. It seems to work for them, as it is perhaps the most popular place to dine in the town and they are working out a deal to expand into the neighboring city.
For me, I’d have to say price. I’m gonna wait till the price drops equivalent to LED watches.
I used to collect books (just a few classics, but mostly Stephen King), and was very proud of my bookcase, but nowadays, if I buy a hardback it has to be King or Koontz, and even then I’ll likely give it to my local library or a friend when I’m done with it.
Are any of y’all like that - it just isn’t that important anymore to collect stuff?
But then again, hell, I’m 58, and some things just aren’t as important as they used to be.:rolleyes:
I’m that way about CD’s too. It has to be VERY special (The Beatles, Stones, Ventures etc.) before I’ll buy it. Not trying to be cynical, but I haven’t heard anything really exciting in music for a number of years now.
Having become somewhat of a Beethoven “scholar”, I do plan to give myself that “Complete Beethoven” CD set for Christmas. I’m reading about Ludwig right now, and I doubt I’ll be giving those books away, because so much of his life (except of course his genius at music!) paralells my own.
I do like the idea of the Kindle. Just need for it to be more affordable.
What about profits for the publishers/author royalties/etc.? I’ve wondered how much they would have to charge to make the same for an e-book as they do on, say, a $28 hardback. Obviously they save on the printing, but they still need to pay themselves and the author- does anybody have any idea how much an average book costs a major publisher to print and distribute [I’m not referring to author’s advance or editor’s fees or anything like that but the actual paper and cardboard and dustjacket]?
I’ve wondered if perhaps the fact that bookstores would fall by the wayside isn’t a deterrent to electronic books catching on. If you got the same book cheaper in electronic format through the computer then you really wouldn’t need to go to the local Barnes & Noble or whatever, and to me that’s a major part of the enjoyment of buying books. Even when I make a surgical strike on a bookstore (go in for one specific book) I rarely leave immediately if I’m not in a rush; I look at other books in the same area, browse my favorite sections, check out the remainders and perhaps the magazines, possibly have a coffee and maybe see a friend- there’s a social aspect to book buying. Also, sometimes I go to the store without a particular book in mind and just peruse what seems interesting.
This reminds me of one of my own favorite things about bookstores and libraries that admittedly isn’t as much of a thing to the younger generations than me but a lot of older-than-HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL crowd can relate to: serendipity. I may go into a bookstore to look for a book on Jonestown and come out with a graphic novel about werewolves or vice versa. When I was an undergrad I used to love to just browse the stacks and see “Hmm… somebody wrote an entire book about Charles Dickens’s wife? Oooh… a book about Alabama’s role in the space race… sexuality of howler monkeys… etc.”, and this type of intellectual grazing is great for building an intellectual infrastructure. You’d miss it if you only went to Amazon for your book purchases.
Although on the subject of the kiddies (here meaning college age), every university I’ve worked at has had access to netlibrary and other full-text book databases, and at every one about the only way I can make a student use them is if they’ve procrastinated and there aren’t any books on the shelves on the same topic. Even the ones who don’t read anything they don’t have to still prefer the hard copy.
Then there’s the tactile of a book- being able to loan it to a friend who doesn’t have the same type of reader you have, the way they look on a shelf and kind of tell a bit about your interests and who you are to guests, the “I want to read something but… hmm… ooh, Conrad Richter, I’ll re-read Light in the Forest” of browsing. Plus I’ll admit I just like the way a book feels, I like being able to gauge how much I’ve read and how much more I have to read by looking at the pages, being able to skip ahead, etc…
But on more tangible points I think the main answers to the OP are:
–cheaper, more “disposable” reader (disposable meaning that if you lose it, it’s not a major loss- less than a cellphone or an Ipod)
–easier file exchange
–something that reproduces color text and photographs (Kindle currently doesn’t)
–more financial incentive to writers and publishers (if there were some way they could charge less but earn more and at the same time guard against it being reproduced without permission
t less tangible points aside, I think that the
People who can tell by the heft when a hard-cover was printed. People who can turn pages in a paper back with one hand while riding the subway. People who never visit family without expecting to exchange at least three books.
Electronic books are not good for recreational reading.
Electronic books are perfect for text-books; cheaper, better, faster. I don’t understand why that market isn’t being focused.
(Are you doing market research for that company I once worked at? Maybe you’ll listen now.)
I agree with a few people in this thread. While it is true that the screen on ebooks could be made so that it is not a strain to read, I do like the feel of books. I enjoy the tactile response from opening a book, turning a page, etc. You don’t get this from an ebook. It feels too cold and sterile for me. Does anyone else feel this way? I even like the smell of a new book (and who can forget the more mature and complex aromas of an old book? When I was a young’un I was absolutely enamored with both the smell and the feel of my father’s old, tattered dictionary). Yes, you can download ebooks from your local library without making a trip… But where is the fun in that? Does nobody enjoy going to the library anymore? You can meet interesting people there, and librarians are often great people and I always enjoy a conversation with them. I’m hardly a Luddite, but I wouldn’t enjoy a world where libraries turn into ebook servers.
Edit:
Sampiro, you hit the nail on the head when you talk about serendipity. Going to the library or the local Barnes & Noble/Kinokuniya/whatever gives you a chance to physically browse the titles. Of course, you can do the same on Amazon or some other website, but with search features, you are less likely to chance upon something that you otherwise wouldn’t have known you wanted to read.
The library bit brings me to a tangent that probably deserves a thread of its own:
What’s the deal with libraries and ebooks? How do they handle them? Are they under strict licenses? I mean, is the library only allowed to, say, loan the latest Dean Koontz ebook to, say, three people at once? Can they just loan it out willy nilly to whomever? Seems to me that would be disastrous for the publishers.
Space, convenience, portability, price, and readability. I have a shockproof cover and waterproof case that can go down ten meters. If I wanted to I could read at the bottom of the pool or in the shower.
I got that covered.
The size thing may be personal preference. What I love about my PDA (Tungsten T|X) is it fits easily in my pocket, I can hold it one hand and comfortably read while standing, eating, or holding a baby. The large screen would be nice, but not worth the lost portability. As for turning the page, that is a simple push of a button that is right under my thumb. I might need to push twice as often as I would need to turn, but it is twice as fast.
What if it was almost as simple, but cheaper and with all the outlined advantages?
I disagree. I started out with a Handspring Visor deluxe (8MB 33Mhz). It could display books just as well as my new Tungsten, which takes several minutes to load the SMDB. Displaying text takes a lot less power than rendering HTML. Multiple book collections can take up 1MB, but you don’t need to keep them all in internal memory. Reduce the internal memory to 8MB, go to lower power processor(which also increases battery life), go to a monochrome screen that does not need a backlight in bright conditions (again, battery life goes up) and you should see a significant savings.
Just to reiterate, it’s not the software that raise the price, but the hardware needed to run that software.
I’m going to go with you here seodoa. There is a feel to books that an e-book doesn’t have. And the smell…There is nothing like the smell of a good research library with some nice old books. Its the smell of knowledge.
Don’t get me wrong I like electronics but I doubt if I’d be able to loan a e-book to a friend, read it in the tub after a long day, or throw it against the wall in disgust when the author or character does something stupid.
Also, there is the beauty of a well stocked bookshelf. Seeing the books all lined up waiting to be read again and again. Waiting to be perused by any passer by. Waiting to speak volumes about the person that put them there.
Furthermore, books can connect me with the past. In front of me I have a first edition of Pebble in the Sky. It is over twice as old as I am and causes me to feel a connection to the past. I can imagine all the people who’ve read it before me, wonder what they though if it, and marvel that I now live at what may have seemed to them like an impossibly distant future.
To sum up my seemingly random statements, what I think holds e-books back is that a lot of readers are sentimentalists and electronic media lacks that certain something that the printed word has.
I can’t answer this question in full, but I can tell you that the standard royalty rate for an e-book is 40%, while the standard royalty rate for a mass market paperback is considerably lower (7%). Clearly, without the overhead of printing, everybody gets a bigger piece of the pie. But this is countered by the fact that ebooks sell cheaper. There was one publisher (I’m sorry, I don’t remember who it was) who tried to sell new ebooks for $15-$20. Everybody who regularly reads ebooks laughed and laughed and laughed. Ebooks are generally priced between $1.50-$8.00, depending on the length and the publisher. Still, if they can afford to give authors a larger percentage even if the books are selling at reduced rates, that indicates to me that ebooks are not a losing proposition.
Some people upthread mentioned pirating. I think the fear of ebook pirating is beyond ridiculous. For one thing, it’s not any different than used bookstores, used book sellers online, people who purchase cheap paperbacks from library sales, people who do “book swaps”, people who sells carts of books on ebay, etc. Authors don’t see a penny of that any time! Sure it happens. I know of several websites where I can DL my own books for free–and I know of several other websites where I can buy my own paperback books. In general, it’s not such a bad thing. If people acquire your book for free and fall in love with it, they’ll buy your other books and tell their friends about it. You can’t buy publicity like that!
As for how ebooks work in libraries–they work the same as other books. My university library has a large collection of ebooks available for students. I just read it on the library’s site, though I seem to recall that I could have the pdf emailed to me, too.
I don’t know what you mean by easier file exchange. Once you purchase and DL an ebook, it’s yours to do with what you will.
The iPhone does that. So does the sony ereader, I think. I was investigating my stanza ap on my iPhone today and about had a geekgasm at all the books right at my fingertips (I was looking at the free public domain stuff) and how clear it all was, including the covers.
Here’s the thing…right now epublishing is great for academic books and niche books. And by niche, at this point, mainly erotic romance and horror. Why does epublishing work so well for those two genres? Because there are certain things that the New York pubs won’t touch. It is damned near impossible to get a major romance publisher to even consider looking at gay romance, but it’s a little known fact in the industry that gay romance is one of the hottest sellers in epublishing (as in, my royalty checks will pay rent and bills not just buy gas and cigarettes). Horror, it’s my understanding, is much the same way. Readers won’t buy ebooks if they can get the equivalent at the bookstore. Readers will buy ebooks if they’re looking for something outside the mainstream, something that they can’t find anywhere else, something that might even get them branded some sort of pervert (If you’re ever bored, go to a romance blog and ask if m/m or f/f books count as romance).
Ebooks are most popular with a group of readers who are getting something very specific from the experience. I think that readers in general will need to be offered something they can’t get from bookstores in order to entice them (whether that’s convenience, or cheap books, or something else entirely). Publishers will go where the readers are, without question (which is 100% true in romance. It’s happening right now). At the same time, I think that very, very soon, there won’t be anything unusual or strange in reading books that are entirely electronic. People are already heading that way.
I think the publisher and the author can do very well all digital. I understand Baen does very well on digital books sales. They offer everything they print right now digital the same day it ships (you can actually buy early and read a quarter two months in advance and half one month in advance). As you say in the rest of your post, it is the book stores that will get shafted.
This actual brings up a good point that I was a little afraid to broach. Bookstores are kind of nice thing to browse in, but so are online books shops. With the added advantage of no book shelf concerns, they can stock a whole lot more books. Yes, shopping online is different, you don’t physically wander, but a good site will let you wander in different ways. It reminds of one of Piers Anthony’s author notes in his Xanth books. This was in the 80s, and he talked about how he had resisted switching to a computer for writing because he thought it would ruin the way he wrote. With a typewriter, you do the first draft, go back and read an redline, then you type the whole thing again, making changes and switching things up. He originally thought if he didn’t have to retype it, he would lose something. When he finally went and tried he found that when he could back space, copy and paste, and all the other things word processors allow you to do he could do a large chunk of his editing on the fly, and he felt his writing improved for it.
Moral is that buying ebooks may change the feel, but they shouldn’t ruin it and may end up improving it. Image books never going out of print, always being in stock and available immediately. Google powered subject searches and smart recommendations and personalized reviews. All these and more are possible once the public really gets behind this.
That’s interesting because at San Francisco State it is almost the opposite. My U.S. Foreign Policy professor actually insisted that at least two of our sources be printed books and not electronic in any way.
Some of this sound like vinyl vs. CD, but the things like browsing and skipping ahead, I can do on my PDA. I have huge library that is always in my pocket. If I am bored with the SF novel I am reading, maybe I want to read some Dickens or a fantasy book. I can do it without leaving the park or gym.
I have addressed your first point several times. I think it could be done now.
You second choice is also possible now but the publishers need to get ahead of the curve on this. Baen is the only one who has a model I like, all books DRM free, a free library to get people hooked on an author or series, unlimited downloads in a variety of formats.
On color texts, I think that is something that should be passed up for now. The majority of books sold do not have color pictures and don’t need them. For now book readers should focus on text only books.
We got the idea when we went to a tech demo severa years ago (I think it was by IBM but I may be mis-remembering) for digital paper (actually it was some kind of plastic polymer I think, but it was flexible and foldable like paper…you could roll it up or lay it out on a non-flat surface just like a sheet of paper) and we sat around our hotel room afterwards drinking, smoking and brainstorming on what we could do with such a product whenever it was cheap enough and could be manufactured in quantity. It doesn’t surprise me that others have come up with similar ideas…like I said, we actually got to the development stage on our own idea before giving it up. Our working model used a laptop for the menu and an early version of 802.11b for the wireless network, with touch screen type tiered menus so you could look over and order what you wanted from either the bar or the various food menus and the orders would be electronically queued up for processing. Customers could check their order place in the queue (to know approximately where their order was in production), change their order (if it was still in the queue), add to their order, call a manager over, and even pay the bill (at the time they would have to type in their credit card number).
The system worked surprisingly well considering the state of the art in systems then, but it was way too expensive without the digital paper (which is still not available today, though I understand it’s getting closer to reality). I have no doubts that someone will eventually make a system much like what we were discussing…even today if one wanted to do an upscale system using, say very cheap notepad style laptops or maybe kiosk style systems built into the tables, you could easily do it and do it well.
I missed this one. No, I am not doing any market research. But I think you are wrong. Music lovers did not stop the CD or the iPod. Books will be around for a long time, but I thin avid readers will become converts if the system is right. I also think that portable readers are terrible for text books. Unless it is large and powerful you lose a lot of the diagrams, illustrations and indexing. I think they are perfect on a computer. I much prefer my technical manuals in pdf format to printouts whenever possible. I see paper books becoming a niche as soon as the publisher get their act together.
How about something like goggles you could put on where the motion of your eye scrolls the text? Hands-free, portable, usable in complete privacy, and usable in the dark.
Well, we can of course simply agree to disagree, but let’s go through a simple test, ehe? Just for drill. Say you hand me your e-book (whichever model you like) and say I toss it up in the air and it lands on a hard surface. First question…what will happen to it? Second question…will you care? Would it bother you? Third question…what if I decide I like it and stuff it in my backpack and bolt for the door…again, will you care? Will it bother you?
If you answered that tossing the thing in the air and having it crash down will cause it to most likely shatter into many small pieces, or at the least become less optimally functional, and if you further answered that you WOULD mind this happening or mind me stealing it from you, then…well, that was the point I was trying to make that you seemingly were disagreeing with me on. The problem with an e-book with a display large enough to really facilitate reading (as opposed to using your iPhone or cell phone or PDA or something like that) is that they are fragile and fairly costly…both bad things for something you wish to be adopted by a lot of people.
Sure, I can and do use my cell phone to surf the StraightDope…I even post from it and surf the web with it. However, it’s kind of a pain in the ass to do any serious reading from as the screen is too small. E-books have larger screens…which add to the cost. It’s not the software that’s expensive (which was another of the points I was making wrt your comment about games and other apps on them) but the hardware. Real, widely adopted e-books aren’t going to REALLY take off until you can make them very light and very cheap…with a look and feel like paper but with all of the advantages of modern data systems connectivity. It WILL happen…it’s just not ready for prime time right now.
Of course, YMMV and if you like your e-book more power too ya!
In my personal experience, these kinds of systems are really stressful for the eyes. One is pretty much forced to focus on a point just an inch or two in front of one’s face, which hurts (at least, it hurts for me).
I’m toying with buying myself a Kindle for Christmas. I’m in school working on a dual masters degree in Library Science and a related field computer Info Science field. I think a Kindle would be great both for the text books and for reading technical books. The searching and annotation parts especially interest me.
But I’m a book gourmand. I own thousands of them. They’re my major decorating feature. I just dropped a hundred dollars on various fiction books last month and I asked myself, which of those would I have bought on the Kindle? Answer: None of them. Getting them as books means I can pass them on to my Dad and then we can talk about them.
I probably won’t spring for a dedicated ereader of any kind until a) I can share ebooks as easily as I do real books and b) I can get selections from my current collection on my reader with a minimum of fuss and cost (and by minimum I mean, none). It’s only a matter of time.
I dunno. I get your point, I’m a book lover too, I have hundreds and hundreds of books. But I used to feel the same way about vinyl records and their large sleeves and going to the record store too and I don’t miss any of that a bit. I’m far more immersed into what’s happening in the music world these days now that I have a nearly infinite source of music as opposed to the whims of the guy choosing what CDs to stock at the local Tower Records. And I’m starting to feel that way about my Sony Reader as well.
