Article: Future of ebooks

[elf]

Nifty article at Mobile Opportunity blog: The future of publishing: Why ebooks failed in 2000, and what that means for 2010. His five points about why they failed, in brief:

1. Not enough ebooks.
2. Ebooks too expensive.
3. The hardware form factor was wrong.
4. Periodical problems.
5. Poor marketing.

In my opinion, 2 & 4 are still serious problems; 3 & 5 are nuisance slowdown factors. #1 has mostly been fixed--not that everything's available as an ebook, but there's *plenty* of ebook content--some of which smacks into 3: it's nearly impossible to read a detailed tech manual with graphs on an iPod's screen.

He touches on some potential solutions:
• Short story sales,
• Backlist sales,
• Rethink *everything* about periodicals

And he's got some terrific questions for publishers to consider, including "What if some of the people you just laid off form an editing cooperative and then contact your authors with a cut-rate offer?"

One of the questions he doesn't address (and publishers are working very very hard to ignore) is, "How much is the ebook market competing with amateur content?" Book publishers like to think that their competition is (1) other book publishers, and (2) newspaper/magazine publishers. They don't think of the local knitter's circle newsletter, nor student-made poetry collections, nor crazy rants that've been photocopied & stapled to telephone poles, as "competition." But in Web 2.0land, they are--because all of those are blogs you might be reading instead of a printed book. And you can find *all the knitting info you want*, with personalized feedback & advice, instead of buying a book of knitting startup tips and hoping you'll be able to understand the instructions.

Ebooks have *almost* reached wide-scale technical feasibility. And the publishers who succeed in the long run will be those who figure out how to exploit the useful features of ebooks while bypassing the drawbacks.

Drawbacks: They *suck* at coffee-table art books. They're going to continue to suck at art books. They suck at research: you can't have six books open at once and easily flip between them; can't put green postits bookmarks on the "history" passages and yellow ones on the "technical info" passages. All the screen displays are poor compared to books; they're okay for straight text, but have problems with pictures, and most of them have *big* problems with diagrams & charts. DRM is a nightmare. Backlist availability is even more of a problem than with pbooks, because you can't hit the used book stores to fill out the gaps in a series. (Used ebooks. Hrm. I'm firmly convinced that ebooks won't *really* go mainstream until there's a legal used ebook market.)

Advantages: Can be cheap. Lightweight/Tiny--not half a pound (~225g) for a novel; not two pounds (~1kg) or more for a textbook. Searchable--if search hasn't been turned off. Easy copy/paste--ditto. Ability to play multimedia games--add sound & vid sections. Easy sharability--if the publishers don't freak out about that. Sharable annotations, maybe.

Authors & publishers are going to have to stop thinking of ebooks as "the computer version of a paper book," and acknowledge them as a completely different medium, with its own pros & cons.

Comments

[darkemeralds]

Maybe it's just me in my myopic little fandom world, but fanfic is a major competitor for the leisure reading time of almost everyone I personally hang out with online.

I think ebooks will only suck at coffee-table duty until there's better connectivity between the reading device and the massive wall-mounted (or coffee-table mounted) hi res full color ultrabright monitor.

Mostly, though, I think we should just lose the term "ebook". The advantages of the book as technical artifact seem to have been whittled down to its post-it-ability. Everything else you mention can or soon will be replicated in some electronic reading form that's more or less as convenient as a heavy textbook--tabbed browsing, various forms of tagging and indexing, etc.

It's just that not all those forms are one thing, in one device; that monolithic "bookness" is what we're probably very far from replicating, and that's why I think we should reconsider the term "ebook."

Mind you, I don't have an alternative. Just thinking out loud in response to your post, which I enjoyed very much.

[amalthia]

I know for me I rarely read published novels because what I mostly read is fan fiction. (for one no DRM) and secondly it's free and a lot of it is GOOD. :)

He did bring up some good points. I'm in a class where many students think ebooks are doomed for failure because kids can't chew on them. (I think print still has it's uses) but I can see the value in ebooks as well as print resources. For one I would not let my hypothetical child chew on my device....