I am a reader. As a reader who travels, I can tell you that books simply aren't very travel friendly. At most I can lug about two books with my other items. This means that I've left books I wanted to read behind. Today I looked around on the web to see what my options might be for downloading e-books.
I can tell you it looks like the publishing industry is in a sad state in this respect. Like the music industry I suppose they will have to be hauled - kicking and screaming at the end of a rope into the modern age. No wonder there are so many pirated pdfs of books in torrents out there.
First, let me just say I don't want to see the end of the printed work - that's why these guys need to get it figured out now.
The problem isn't that difficult to solve really. Some company *kind* of like Apple needs to come along and fix it. (innovative like Apple, but maybe not Apple, they have botched a few things with music on iTunes).
Let me propose a few things that would fix it right here:
1. The price must be lower than physical books.
You would think this a no-brainer, but if you look at ebooks.com or amazon you will find that for most e-books they sell are exactly the same price on account that the publishers are morons and still haven't realized that selling 1 BILLION books is better than selling 100 MILLION. And yes, one day you will see a BILLION copies (digital) of a work sold. For God's sake Harry Potter has sold 110 Million physical as of 2007.
2. The format must be transferable.
If you buy a physical book you at least have some option for re-selling it. You can give it to a friend, you can do whatever you want with it. Come up with a network of servers that 'register' the copy of the book. If I want to give it you, I simply assign it to you. You then own it. This could also create a secondary market of used ebook sales. It also means something else you could NEVER do with physical books - pay additional royalties to the authors on subsequent re-sells. Yep. What author wouldn't want that?
3. The ebook reader / library must be simple.
This is probably the most important point. The software that displays the book needs to be simple. You need to be able to download (or receive) the file and open it without hassles. It also needs to run on multiple devices: computer, pc, proprietary reader. I could launch into how this involves an encrypted id of some kind, key/pair system authenticating against a server if the 'owner' key isn't found...limited number of 'temp' key generations to prevent abuse..etc..but I'm not a crypto expert. I imagine there are at least ten different ways to do this without hassling the reader at all. I don't even care if I *must* carry around a proprietary memory stick module that contains the files and the xfer software. That would be great - just something small that enables this to happen.
There - done, solved. Do that and people like me would buy ebooks by the freaking millions. There are some technical challenges in there, but so what? Harder than an iPod touch interface to perfect? Nope. This is largely a people problem. I urge someone with weight like Google to get this together. Solve the medium and the distribution and then dangle a carrot of immense wealth in front of existing authors. Once they start authoring new works for this medium specifically the publishers will get in line.
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4 comments:
not so sure about the used e-book sales, rob. reselling anything digital sounds like a sketchy proposition, at best. but i'm with you on the e-books, otherwise. also, i would be concerned by what types of DRM these files would have, although that point is largely moot, since anything can be pirate-bayed.
maybe apple will come out with a stylish reader, with some nifty features like bookmarking, highlighting, notes in the "margin", etc. that would be cool, though i wonder if i could afford it. amazon's kindle cost $400 last time i checked. $400 buys a lot of paper books, new or used. and anything that apple makes is guaranteed to cost at least 75% more than an equivalent product manufactured by a company who doesn't have the kind of trend-following fan base that apple has.
i haven't tried a kindle, yet. i don't think i'll be plunking down the money they want for that, but i can see the advantages.
i can also see the disadvantages for the company that manufactures itty bitty book lights. :-)
Yeah some good points there. Let me address a few. I suspect in the not too distant future we will see a viable re-sale architecture for digital goods. I know someone working on one right now in fact. The final form is anyone's guess, but essentially it will make it worthwhile to re-distribute your purchased item for both the author and the owner.
The book readers just don't seem viable. As you have pointed out, they cost too much. Also, notebooks are shrinking to the same size anyway, and prices there continue to drop. I do welcome a different device, but maybe it will be some kind of flexible plastic touch interface that can roll up into a tube (ala mission to mars) before we see really useful devices here.
Nintendo is releasing a cookbook (complete with video examples) for the DS. It would be awesome for them to release other books in this manner.
the DS seems to be slowly moving away from pure gaming territory, and into areas previously reserved for PDAs and PCs.
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