eBook readers are "one trick ponies"

One trick pony? No. Expensive pony? Yes

The only thing holding back eBooks is the price, although not so much the reader as the book prices, which are absurd!
How can they justify £9 for an ebook when the hardback costs £7.99 and the paperback is £6 or less!!
The DRM is painful and prevents you from giving or receiving ebooks. There goes asking for a book for my Birthday!

We should be able to download a DRM-free format of book that can be emailed to our nearest and dearest as gifts and cost a significant percentage less than the paper copy.

WHEN and only when that happens, eBooks will take off.

Ask iTunes what apps sell fastest in their app store, the £0.59 ones or the £8.99 ones? You guess...

By cheysuli on 2 Nov 2009

I'm not convinced about using ebook readers for reading books. As the partner of an avid book reader, there's a certain collection element with physical books that cannot be recreated digitally. I wish it could, as I wouldn't have to put together so many Ikea bookshelves...

However, as a researcher I am interested in the devices for reading pdf files of journal papers. Reading from PC screens is not ideal, due to eyestrain and the fact they're fixed in space - and laptops are relatively bulky compared to the ebook readers.

Regarding the article, what's wrong exactly with one-trick ponies? Saying that an ebook reader is underpowered because it doesn't have the features of a smartphone is like saying my car isn't fit for purpose because it doesn't have a toaster to make my breakfast installed.

Why does every device produced have to do everything? Surely a series of specialised devices that do their job very well is better than one that does everything badly? Surely no smartphone is going to have a big enough screen to be usable as an ebook reader, and any device big enough is going to be inconvenient as a phone? It seems ebook readers are designed for black-and-white text display, and according to many sources they do this well. Does it have to come with a web browser and/or contacts/calendar etc that my laptop has anyway?

By piphil on 2 Nov 2009

I'm with piphil. I think the "analysts" have got this completely wrong. Where eBook readers fail is in not doing their one trick well enough. If you want to specialise (and there is nothing wrong with that) you need to be phenomenally good at that one specialisation. That means buying eBooks should be incredibly quick and cheap - you've just forked out £200-ish for the device. Those books need to be as unrestricted as the physical thing.

It's a young market. Hopefully, they won't make the same mistakes the music/video industries have and cripple the whole thing by trying to use it as a means of restricting consumer power. Done well, eBook sales could be huge and revenues could soar. Done badly, with DRM that tries to force you to pay multiple times in cases where, with a physical book, you would have paid once, and they will remain a niche.

By Bassey1976 on 2 Nov 2009

When I bought an iPod, I could transfer my whole CD collection on to it easily, meaning that I had a jumpstart on getting a critical mass of music on to it. With an eReader, I'm starting from scratch, making it a very expensive device on a per-book basis unless I plan on buying a very large number of books. A solution to this problem would generate far greater sales.

So, how about working out a deal with either publishers or perhaps through the resale market, where you can exchange your physical book for an electronic version, perhaps with a small fee for the process but significantly cheaper than buying a electronic copy outright.

By WillBtK on 2 Nov 2009

Publishers are still terrified of making genuine changes to the way they acquire, market and distribute books. They have an ancient creaking system to maintain, just like the record companies tried to.
(PCPro illustrates some of the archaic absurdities of publishing... six-week lead times? January issues in November..?)

Publishers have the advantage over record companies that their product is slightly harder to pirate, so they are not in a hurry. They are pitching their prices high to appeal to people with more money than sense/spare time and to make it look like they are 'with it' (daddio). Pricing ebooks cheaper than real books may seem obvious to us but to book publishers it's like opening the floodgates to anarchy, mass breach of copyright and the ruination of their business. They cannot get their heads round any alternative.

The TV and film industry is the same - the 21st century market is like the deck of the Titanic, tilting more and more steeply. Some sellers hang on screaming, some run up to the stern, others carrying on playing the violin, while the smart ones run for the lifeboats...

The lifeboats in this case being schemes that let punters pay bottom dollar for legit DRM-free copies with fewer layers in between the artists that create and the punters that consume. Not enough of them around to save everyone..!

As a freelance TV writer I make my money indirectly from advertising, but standing back and looking at it, it seems an absurd system... much as the court system must have appeared to Dickens when he wrote the satire Bleak House. Which is available as a DRM-free ebook, in case I'm accused of wandering off the point...

By Noghar on 2 Nov 2009

Not a fan of total convergence...

Don't see why everything has to do everything. I like my calculator to just be a calculator - I don't want it to tell me what the weather in Cancun is like!

On the subject of pricing, I agree that having forked out ~£200 for an e-reader, the publishers need to realise that book prices need to at least have parity with paper versions, if not be cheaper. Pyaing more for a restricted digital copy, after having paid for the privilege of accessing said digital medium, will prove a barrier to mass acceptance of these devices.

I honestly can't see any realistic objections (even for money-hungry, paranoid publishers) to flogging a physical book bundled with a digital copy for around £10 for a paperback. The publisher can still get their sales, people get the physical book as well as the digital for around the same price as the current e-books alone are charged for (meaning sense of value is increased) and things can be DRM'd to the hilt with higher acceptance.

For example, when I purchased Hancock on Blu-Ray, it came with a bonus digital copy - the quality was poor even compared to DVD and its copying was limited, but still, was nice to have.

By bioreit on 2 Nov 2009

Worries?

At present, the publishers can see a physical book being bought & lent to others, not a big problem - 1 book can only be passed around to one person at time, slowly. However, if an eBook gets sold, it could be copied & passed on to several friends in a very short time - uploaded, that same book could be shared to several hundred thousand within minutes.
This is what is scaring the publishers, right or wrong, they still fear about lost sales. In the case of text books written for students, they may even be right to worry.
However, charging more for a digital file than for a paper copy is not going to help them grow the market, either

By greemble on 2 Nov 2009

Lets take a look at second hand books - second hand fiction books typically cost about £3. As far as I'm concerned, that's what the words are worth! We might pay extra for a new book that either is just out, or we get the feel of the new pages, but on the whole I feel the text of a book is worth somewhere around £3 to me.

An e-book reader, being useful for PDF, and out of copyright books, is not limited to the books available to buy through digital sellers, which is worth bearing in mind.

By Penguat on 2 Nov 2009

Not like the iPod

The market for eBooks is waaaay smaller than for the iPod, simply because fewer people read than listen to music, and many of these will NOT switch to eBooks (that's if the reaction of my book reading friends is anything to go by).

By Lacrobat on 2 Nov 2009

There's some really excellent comments in this thread

This is nail on the head stuff. I really don't want my ebook reader to do anything other than display things for me to read - it's effectively a sheet of paper that changes its contents by loading files and pressing buttons. It needs to be £200 worth of good at its job, though. I don't need £200 of convergence features because if I did I'd buy something else.

By steviesteveo on 3 Nov 2009

Not a chance

cheysuli is right, the price is holding the ebook reader back. It's not just the price of the books, it's the price of the reader, too.

I tend to buy used books off of eBay or other similar outlets. They don't cost very much. I can sell them on afterwards or lend them to a friend, and I don't have to worry about throwing a book at the bottom of my bag as it won't come to much harm there.

I can't do any of this with an ebook reader.

For me it would have to be cheap, there would need to be a lot of free content, and I would need to have some other kind of hook on top of that.

Maybe the ebook readers would do better aiming at niche markets such as the geek market. If Amazon could get a contract with Marvel or DC. I'm sure that there are loads of Bill Gates type geeks out there who'd pay good money for 50 years of back issues.

By Perfectblue97 on 3 Nov 2009