Why Ebooks haven’t taken off
I was struck with the inspiration for this article while reading an article about Sony's launch of a new ebook reader device. I'm afraid the reason that ebooks haven't hit the big time is quite a sad commentary on society's value system.
Digital book file sizes are small, and those files contain much more information than any music file. This means that a person can get much more amusement out of them for the same amount of data. This also means that any reader device does not need a substantial amounts of memory to contain a large amount of content.
The first challenge is the requirement for good display technology that's portable and doesn't require large amounts of energy to run -- 'E-paper' is coming into the limelight, and one of the driving forces for it has been ebook readers.
The early days of legal, purchased book downloading were very similar to the early days of legal, purchased music downloading: files were expensive, there was a limited selection, and the downloads were tethered. Later the 'tethered' aspect stopped, but they were still expensive and to this day many portable ebooks are bound to a specific platform or player. How did they expect people to pay $10 for a three year old paperback of popular fiction that's available at any used bookstore for half that much? The expense issue is artificial, as the issue of printing the book is removed, and that seems to be responsible for about half the cover price. Factor in lower costs for distributors (~$35%) and books don't cost so much any more.
Audible.com has proven that book-like content (audio books) can be inexpensive and relatively popular. So why haven't electronic books been such a huge hit?
Part of it, I believe, is that the books marketed in electronic format aren't a hit with the crowd of early adopters that would purchase e-readers. Most of the publications, for some reason, were the standard popular fiction fare that is relatively unpopular among the early-adopting geek crowd. Hopefully soon that should be changing, and it would be nice to have a service like Safari available on an e-reader, storage requirements be damned.
One thing is obvious - manufacturer's haven't given up on trying to obtain a 'hip' device like the ipod, because the rewards for the one who does are significant. I think that the lesson of the ipod is one of the main reasons that manufacturers keep trying. Even though the ipod is hardly the ideal music player it comes fairly close. And similarly, although we won't see ideal e-reader devices for some time, the first popular device that's affordable and comes to market with a wide selection of titles is sure to be the next ipod.
It could also be that people perceive books differently, and I'm sure that the atmosphere of who enjoys them is different from listeners of music. The 'rapper' subculture and pop culture icons aren't the best bet for encouraging literacy. Portable music players are 'cool' because lots of different types of music are popular among lots of different groups. Books are nowhere near as popular, especially among the youth that drive music consumption. I do think that one of the reasons that ebooks haven't taken off is not just a lack of literacy in our society, but a lack of respect for literacy. I find it no surprise that the subcultures that have taken to the electronic book readers are also among the more literate ones -- both geek culture and academia have a healthy respect for literacy.
Comments
"Digital book file sizes are small, and those files contain much more information than any music file. This means that a person can get much more amusement out of them for the same amount of data."
Them's fightin' words!
That said, also keep in mind that listening to music is very different than reading. Listening to music can be either passive or active, reading is active. You can leave music playing in the background while doing something else (like dancing around like an idiot a la iPod commercials); it would be quite a lot harder to dance around like an idiot while reading a book, even if your ebook reader comes with anti-skip technology:P
by 'more amusement', I meant in a temporal sense. Three megs of book goes a hell of a lot further than three megs of MP3. That's about two-and-a-half copies of 'War and Peace'.
Speaking of anti-skip -- the only advantage non-CD-based music players really do have is that they don't skip. Of course, my major gripe with music players is that they don't support ogg, and those that do (a la iRiver) just flat out suck.
Yes, I'd considered that, but I don't think it's a big factor -- lots of people *just* listen to music, actively. I don't think it's enough to make a difference. "Look at me, I can be a mindless corporate shrill too!!!"
Temporally speaking, music does have more replayability. Not that you'd want to replay the same 3 megs *that* much... though you might over a lifetime, actually...
My mp3 player supports ogg. And is pretty well designed.
What player would that be? Tasha and I tried an iriver model that was advertised as playing ogg files, but it would only play some of them -- older ones that were ripped with version 1.0 of the encoder, not the newer version. And the newer version spec that the new ogg files used was backwards-compatible with the first spec. Obviously their implementation of the codec was busted...
So we returned the thing, and futureshop took it back easily. Kinda expensive at the time too, considering what you can get them now for.
As far as replayability goes: you might also want to re-read the same books over a lifetime. I don't think that's a fair comparison, actually.
Unless your interests in music change over time -- I'm not sure how likely this is, or how it varies depending on a person's age. But how long a lifespan can an audio player or an ebook reader be expected to have? A few years, based off the lifetime of other portable electronics. Hell, none of the portable CD players I've purchased have lasted three.
http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?logon=&langid=EN&sku_id=...
It was on sale when I got it.
I had no idea that any of the MPIO players could do ogg. Short of hardware limitations, there's no reason not to as the ogg players are royalty-free.
But for now, i think I'll wait. If I *really* need it, I have a 90-gig music player sitting on my lap :P
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