There’s the prestige, the cultural cache of having a well stocked bookshelf too that many people wouldn’t eschew. CDs were never in this category although vinyl was/is.
I agree with this remark, as I stated in an earlier post, but I beg to differ WRT CDs never being part of a “cultural cache.” Perhaps in your culture/subculture they held no prestige, but plenty of children born in the 80s viewed large CD collections with a great deal of prestige, and many still do. My brother’s living room, for example, is filled with shelves, racks, and displays of his many CDs. He has adopted MP3, but he will never give up his CDs and continues to add to the collection. Different media are viewed differently by different cultures and generations.
Something no one’s mentioned yet:
An attractive way to give e-books as gifts.
Right now, a book is a very good moderate-price, low-risk kind of gift to give someone, especially someone who you only know slightly. Now, you could print up some kind of gift card or certificate or whatever, but it’s just not the same. I’m not sure that there’s a way around this one - people seem to still mainly give each other music on CDs as well.
I’m not a fan of ebooks because I am old and set in my ways. I only got a cell phone last year. At this point I do not see me buying another gadget.
However, I do have all of the Doc Savage novels and a heckuvalotta other books I downloaded from various sources on my computer at work. I can read them during down-time and it looks to a casual observer that I am working.
I thought you were going to say the goggles do nothing. 
Regarding book collections: I have thousands of books, but I’ve given away half of what I have so far. I used to have the strong urge to own all the books I read, but now I’m happy to borrow them from the library and not deal with the clutter and expense.
I haven’t pursued electronic books because I’m too cheap. But I will someday be converted since I like them very much in theory. I like the size, the storage, etc.
Well, you are taking things to ridiculous levels by trying to put the cost into it of things like the book shelves and weight and such. But I’ll bite…you take your device and put it over your head and drop it. I’ll take my 600 books and drop them from the same height. It will take me a while to clean up my books but in the end most of them will be undamaged and still quite readable. You have just lost your device AND the 600 books you had stored there (unless you have the book images on your PC). So…I’m mildly concerned about dropping my books while you would be quite anxious about me dropping your palm, no?
How much did your Palm cost you? How much did e-books on it cost you?
I use my Trio in much the same way…but I wouldn’t want to try and read a novel on it. Even reading SDMB threads can be a challenge some times. Most of the e-book specific readers I’ve seen are much larger than a standard PDA and fairly expensive the last time I checked (something like $100-200 IIRC).
As to the features in an e-book…definitely I love them and find them much more convenient than traditional paper books. However, for such a niche oriented vertical product if you want it to be widely adopted (which was what the OP was asking) and not used solely by techno-geeks like you and me, it’s going to need to be cheaper and lighter, with a large display that will look and feel more like traditional printed material but with all those advantages you talk about. People are going to have to feel like they are reading a page in a magazine or news paper or a real book…and they are going to have to have the same feeling about risk and damage of traditional books. Not many people are going to buy the larger display readers because they are bulky and fairly expensive, they are fragile and subject to breakage and theft. Using your PDA or cell phone, even with the bigger displays, is IMHO not going to be a serious option for reading large novels and such except by a very small percentage of folks (such as yourself).
-XT
One of the reasons I read is to get away from technology.
Ironically (because of what I use) I get away from technology by playing computer games. 
But I agree…every time I go on a business trip (oh, about once a week) I take a few books with me, even though I have a Zune and an iPod (I do put audio books on the Zune of course, but rarely e-books). If I’m going to read something on the plane or in my hotel room at night I much prefer a book to a reader…at least any reader that I would go out of my way to buy.
-XT
ISTM that this is a perfect app for cell phones and PDAs. It would be pretty easy to create an online version of a menu that was easily readable on a cell phone screen, complete with links to a ‘shopping cart,’ and so forth.
Overseas, apparently people use cell phones for all sorts of applications that nobody ever thinks about doing here, due to the structure of the telecom industry, but that’s a whole 'nother rant. Still, this one should be doable even within the constraints imposed by the telephone oligopoly.
In my experience CDs have been different, I have no statistics though, just personal experience. Sure some people display their CDs openly, but books are a more common ‘ornament’.
You don’t need a separate gadget. You can read ebooks on laptops, on smartphones, on blackberrys, on PDAs, etc. You can transfer the books from devise to devise. There are ebook stores that allow you to store your purchased books on their “virtual bookshelf” so even if something happened to your computer (or whatever you are reading it on), you won’t lose the book. And you can share a book. Just email it to whoever you want to share it with–well, I don’t know how that works with the kindle. They probably make it so easy sharing isn’t really possible, but the Kindle is just one choice right now out of many.
One other thing to consider is that bookstores are in serious trouble right now. They’ve been in serious trouble for awhile, and this economic downturn is just going to make it worse for them. There are lots of reasons, but the most popular one is that people aren’t reading as much as they used to. I doubt that’s true, actually. I think that, for the most part, they’re just getting their books at places other than Borders and Barnes & Nobel. But they’re going to have to do something to stay afloat, or the publishing industry is going to have to learn to function without them. I personally think that everybody would be better served if bookstores were cut out of the equation all together (I know, I know, heresy. But bookstores have a surprising–amazing–amount of clout over publishers. Not consumers, but bookstores. They can change the title, the cover, the blurb, and even refuse to stock a book unless there are edits/changes. They do this, ostensibly, because it will make a book more salable…and yet, they’re suffering! Imagine that. Bookstores also keep books out of the readers hands. A book that’s already been submitted, vetted, bought, edited, edited, edited, proofed, proofed, and put into production can be canceled if the bookstores deem it unworthy but now this is turning into a rambling rant so I’ll move on). I doubt publishers would be too devastated if they found a way to make ebooks attractive to the majority of readers.
I am not Uzi, but I will bite. My Palm is T|X I got for $200 (open box). The SD card cost $20, the ebooks, vary in price from free (Baen’s free library, Gutenberg, etc.) to $6 dollars, with most of them in the $2-4 range. So, I have spent a total of $200 on 300 books (bought over an 8 year period). So that is $420 dollars for 300 books or $1.4 dollars per book. My last PDA (Tungsten E) went 4 years of service and I was willing to pay an extra hundred dollars for this PDA over what I could have gotten a E2 or Z22 for because I want to watch movies on it in addition to read books.
As for replacement costs, the PDA I could replace for $100 if I only want to read books, or $200 for the same model. The books would not cost me anything even if every piece of electronics I own was stolen at the same time. The places I get my books have unlimited download after purchase. I can download the first book I ever bought at Baen with no hassle.
You may be right, but I don’t believe it. I can read faster and more conveniently on my PDA. Properly formatted novels read fine on my screen. Unformulated text, like Project Gutenberg uses also displays without issue. I have read Dickens and Jane Austen as well as Eric Flint and Larry Niven. SF and other genre seem to be doing best right now because they do not appeal as much to the prestige and book as status reader.
Based on the responses so far, it seems that time is needed for publishers to catch on and consumers to get used to it.
Jonathan
I am not in the industry, but from what I understand right now most marketing is not aimed at consumers, but at book stores. No shelf space no books. If the store buys two copies of a new book and they get misplaced, lost, or hidden, they never get bought and no new ones will ever be ordered. The online model is so much better for authors as well as consumers. Amazon can give “shelf” space to every book ever published without much incidental cost to the web site. If the books are digital, there is almost no cost to store a data file the size of an eBook, so books need never go out of print and the barriers for publishing would go down. The publisher does not have to decide how big the run is going to be, they just create a master file and make it available in an online store.
Jonathan
I am an avid reader and lover of books. My personal library of books is over 1000.
I’ve switched over to exclusively reading ebooks. I have a Nokia770 Internet Tablet that functions exactly how I want an ebook reader to function. It is backlit, has removable media, is rechargeable, is easy to read one handed. Powers off after a period of inactivity. It reads almost every format with free software called Fbreader. PDF’s are kind of a pain, but I convert them easily on my PC and transfer the books over. It has a 2 gig memory card which holds a frightening amount of books. It has a great case that has kept my screen perfect even when thrown in my purse. It has survived a dive in a 5 gallon bucket of water and periodic drops off the side of my bed.
I haven’t read a “real” book in almost two years.
I didn’t mean book lovers will band together to defeat the evil ebook; I mean they won’t buy them.
People read for two reasons, information and enjoyment. People who read primarily for enjoyment have deeply pleasant emotions for real books; they also loan, trade, and steal books. (Most readers I know probably buy less than half their books).
This is not a good market to focus on with a new and expensive product.
People who read for information need it in a convenient portable and easily searched format. Not all information requires diagrams or illustrations. But I didn’t know indexing was a problem.
Solve indexing, and use them for text books.
(The music lovers I know use their ipods for podcasts.)
what pepperlandgirl said back in post #22 makes sense. kids nowadays are used to reading texts on screens. the reasons given so far are mostly nostalgic. the ability to throw your books around is moot for a people already carrying a couple of gadgets with them.
what they don’t need is yet another toy to lug around. when affordable laptops have thinned down to ebook sized tablets or people’s palate for reading bite-sized pages increases, everyone will have one.
Time and money.
When one of my favourite authors , David Weber brings out a new Honorverse novel, I want it now. Not six months from now when it hits my local chapters for 30 bucks and not 2 and a half years later when it hits in paperback. At most when I buy it , it will be 15 bucks for an advanced copy or six bucks when it releases.
Storyline books
Most authors are coming out with multiple book storys, but its not usually always a complete set at chapters , due to space limitations. I can order a book ya , but its not quite the same.
Last I would say the ability to find new authors again, back when paperbacks were 2 bucks, I would buy up to five at time and not care if one was a dud. Now that they are 11 or 12 bucks , I target the authors i want to read and maybe take a chance every six months or so , on an unknown. That is if they are even stocked.
Declan
For me to switch to ebooks, they’ll have to be cheaper and sturdier. I got a cell phone last year, and I hate having to remember to take it out of my purse and recharge it, so that’s another thing that ebooks have against them, for me.
On the other hand, I would enjoy compressing my library down to just a few paper books, and then having the rest stored in digital form.
But on the gripping hand, I’m old enough to remember when home movies were shot with quite an expensive gadget, and I know that now those movies are pretty much unplayable, because the projectors are just about extinct, and of the projectors that do exist…well, better take great care with them, because people who know how to fix them are also just about extinct. Later, it was Betamax, then VHS, now it’s DVD and BluRay. I can still read a book that was printed 100 years ago, but I can’t watch home movies shot 50 years ago. Nor can I play computer games that I bought 25 years ago. If I invest in a technology, I want it to be around for me when I want to use it. And I suspect that THIS is the main reason a lot of people are not jumping on the ebook bandwagon.
Which is why the recently agreed open standard format needs to be made the default. The Sony device is the best I’ve seen but the Sony store is loaded with their own proprietary format stuff, loaded with DRM crap.
I lurves me my Kindle. Even so, it goes for significant periods without being used just because there is indeed something about the tactile sensation of a book that is hard to give up. Also, I agree with Mangetout’s point that it is one more expensive gadget you have to worry about losing. However:
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I go on long trips - Jakarta to Guadalajara and back a lot these days, unfortunately. And I read fast. The Kindle replaces 10 or 20 paperbacks I’d have to lug around and guarantees I won’t run out of things to read somewhere over the Pacific ocean.
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I’m surprised environmental sensitivity has not come up in this thread (or if it has, I missed it - apologies). Every book read on a Kindle instead of in the old fashioned way means that much less paper consumed.
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You can keep a gazillion eletronic books without taking up any space, unlike hard copies.
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In Indonesia, I can’t just head down to the bookstore and expect to find any book I want. (We do have a remarkably good selection, for anyone who thinks we’re backward - we are most certainly NOT. But we are far from having a Borders or WaldenBooks kind of choice.) I also cannot get any book I want on the Kindle - but my choice is certainly expanded a great deal, and I don’t even have to leave my house to get more reading materials.
Technology like the Kindle is hard to get used to when the old-fashioned alternative is so nice. But that is nothing more than habit. We might as well mourn the satisfying sensation of using a rotary telephone. My 10-year-old son borrows my Kindle a lot and thinks it is perfectly fine. He’ll growup feeling like it is perfectly ordinary technology.