(Published in the Business Standard, July 13, 2009, in a fit of frustration at the quality of e-readers on the market. Quick summary: "What kind of reading revolution can you usher in with blunt swords such as these etc?")
In A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller imagined a world where reading was banned, books contraband, ideas feared. In this world, a small group of monks work as bookleggers, concealing books in kegs, smuggling them out when possible, and as memorizers, committing works of literature, history, science to memory in giant, library-shelf sized chunks.
Like many book lovers who struggle with the downside of maintaining large and unwieldy personal libraries, I’ve often wanted a memorizer of my own—a highly efficient reading machine, trained to understand your tastes and regurgitate the texts you want. But as Plastic Logic and Cool-er join the ranks of the Kindle and the Sony e-reader, I’ve gone from e-reader evangelism to scepticism, watching in dismay as the industry gets it dead wrong.
Those who’ve followed the e-reading debate over the last decade will know that most of the discussion has focused on the pros and cons of reading on a device versus the familiarity of the dead-tree book. But the real question is what we get and expect from a book versus an e-reader, and this is where the manufacturers have messed up. It’s been nine years since the first iPod came out, but none of the present e-book readers seem to have learned anything from the music industry. Here’s a short list of what I want from an e-reader, and what’s missing from the current generation.
I want a wide choice of books: The Kindle restricts readers to what’s available on Amazon, the Borders e-reader offers books from the Borders stores and the easiest way to get books on the Sony e-reader is through CONNECT. This is theoretically a wide enough range for most readers, and some argue that it mimics the bookstore experience, where you’re restricted by the bookseller’s choice of what to stock. But you’re buying a device, not a book—and that device should be a portal into all online bookstores. The current situation would be analogous to buying a car and being told that you can only drive on certain roads.
I want to buy books at a lower price and in a choice of formats: Currently, e-books are cheaper than paperbacks—but not by a large enough margin. If I’m sacrificing some things—print quality, paper size, reading ease with some e-reader screens, comfort levels—in order to buy an e-book, I want it to be as relatively cheap as the average iTunes download. I also don’t see why I have to be stuck with bad design, or a font I don’t like, in an electronic format. Not every reader is going to want to turn book designer, but enough of us want at least the ability to fiddle with the text. The biggest problem here is that e-readers, priced roughly between $199 to $300, are too expensive, especially when you factor in the cost of electronically replacing your personal library, and the strong resistance to e-reading from old school booklovers.
I want to be able to share, loan or resell my e-books the same way I do with my personal, dead-tree library: According to students at Columbia Law School who’ve been studying e-book contracts, what readers buy is more a license to read e-books than the ability to own them. As with the music industry, the publishing industry is caught between the need to protect authors against piracy versus the need to let customers own their reading material. Currently, customers lose—and I don’t like the idea that I wouldn’t be able to share an ebook in the same way that I can share my paperback collection.
I want to be able to organise my e-book library with the same flexibility with which I can organise my 3D library: This is a big surprise, but none of the e-readers currently on the market have actually thought hard about letting readers organise their content. I expect this will change pretty fast, but there’s no e-reader equivalent of “playlists” or decent cross-indexing. If you’re trying to use e-readers to read and store magazine or newspaper articles in particular, or if you like rearranging your virtual library shelves every so often, this is a serious negative.
I retain my faith in e-reading itself. It offers a way out for a beleagured publishing industry, and could, theoretically, make a huge difference to the number of readers that the average author might be able to reach. I love the idea of being able to store my library on one device, of not having to wait until books trickle in from the US or the UK.
But until the e-book industry gets it right, I’m considering hiring a monk with a naturally large RAM drive and a yen for memorization. He may require chanting music and a light sattvic diet, but he won’t drive me mad with bad formatting, a truncated reading selection and a reluctance to share texts with my friends.
Showing posts with label e-reader. Show all posts
Showing posts with label e-reader. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Thursday, August 30, 2007
The Elusive E-book
(October 31, 2006, Business Standard)
The first evangelists of the e-book claimed, back in the 1990s, that the new, electronic book would kill off the printed paper version forever. By 2004, it was clear that the reports of the demise of the paper book had been greatly exaggerated. The few e-readers on the market were clunky machines that sacrificed the charm of the portable, user-friendly device we know as the paper book without significant gains.
Readers wanted the same print quality they had on "real" books, the same portability, the same ability to flip pages with ease, scribble in the margins—and more. They wanted cheap e-readers and cheap e-books, high print quality that didn't strain the eyes the way reading on a computer screen does, the ability to search books with ease, to copy and paste paragraphs or chapters and to share and download books the way we increasingly share and download music and video.
Publishers wanted copy-protection to safeguard their rights and the rights of authors, relatively high prices so that e-books wouldn't undercut the print versions, guarantees that investing in e-books wouldn't lead to rampant piracy.
Authors wanted the higher sales that e-books promised, with the added lure of knowing your book would never go out of print—but they were also afraid of being ripped off by e-book pirates.
As of 2006, none of these groups have got what they wanted, even though the Sony Reader, Google's online publishing ambitions, Amazon's forthcoming e-book store and other initiatives indicate a slow return of interest in the e-bookwagon.
Before we get down to specifics, here are two things the publishing industry might want to consider. The first is the proliferation of file-sharing networks such as Limewire, where users trade music and video files—and increasingly, share scanned or e-text versions of books. Limewire grapples with copyright (and computer virus!) issues in the same way that the music-sharing network Napster did before it and that the video-sharing network YouTube does today. You can find pirated books on Limewire—I've found everything from Jonathan Franzen's latest to the newest Harry Potter, available for illegal, free download—but users who perpetrate piracy are often reported and shut down.
Publishers need to worry far more about those users who put up scanned, pirated copies of books on bulletin boards and underground networks. If you know your way around the net, you can locate almost every major bestseller via one of these sites, though I would strongly advise against downloading pirated books on moral grounds.
In addition, the publishing industry might be forced to reconsider its old, paper-and-bookstore driven way of doing business when the current generation of computer users, used to reading on screen, uncomfortable with print books that can't be hyperlinked or plugged into the web, becomes the book buyers of the future.
It's a myth, if a well-established one, that this group of users don't read. They do, but they're choosy about how they read in a way that people over 30 find hard to comprehend. What this demographic wants is the e-reader equivalent of the i-Pod: a cheap, searchable, portable, easy-to-use device that offers an almost unlimited selection of books from a global library.
As of 2006, none of these groups have got what they wanted, even though the Sony Reader, Google's online publishing ambitions, Amazon's forthcoming e-book store and other initiatives indicate a slow return of interest in the e-bookwagon.
The closest the industry has come to delivering on this is the Sony Reader, which excited considerable interest at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair. I played with one of these gizmos and came away with mixed feelings.
In terms of look and feel, the Sony Reader scores high—it's leatherbound, book-sized, a comfortable fit in your handbag, and the specially developed e-Ink it uses is much closer to the paperback reading experience than the eye-straining computer screen reading experience.
But the only reason it even remotely resembles the i-Pod of the publishing industry is because it has no competition. The Amazon Kindle, the giant online bookstore’s e-reader, looks clunky, old-fashioned and nothing like a book in comparison.
But the Sony Reader has an irritating lag-time while pages refresh; it doesn’t allow readers to skip ahead to specific numbers, doesn’t allow annotations or marginalia and its search function is a joke at present (a future version should allow word search, Sony says). At $350, it’s far too expensive given its limited features and almost deliberately awkward controls, even for a hardcore reading addict and e-book evangelist like me.
What the Sony Reader does, however, is bring readers tantalisingly close to the Holy Grail of the e-book that’s even better than the real thing. With a few significant tweaks, any one of the big guys—Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Sony itself—could create an e-book that actually works. That would rewrite the blue-pencilled early history of electronic publishing, but will they get their act together before book pirates do?
The first evangelists of the e-book claimed, back in the 1990s, that the new, electronic book would kill off the printed paper version forever. By 2004, it was clear that the reports of the demise of the paper book had been greatly exaggerated. The few e-readers on the market were clunky machines that sacrificed the charm of the portable, user-friendly device we know as the paper book without significant gains.
Readers wanted the same print quality they had on "real" books, the same portability, the same ability to flip pages with ease, scribble in the margins—and more. They wanted cheap e-readers and cheap e-books, high print quality that didn't strain the eyes the way reading on a computer screen does, the ability to search books with ease, to copy and paste paragraphs or chapters and to share and download books the way we increasingly share and download music and video.
Publishers wanted copy-protection to safeguard their rights and the rights of authors, relatively high prices so that e-books wouldn't undercut the print versions, guarantees that investing in e-books wouldn't lead to rampant piracy.
Authors wanted the higher sales that e-books promised, with the added lure of knowing your book would never go out of print—but they were also afraid of being ripped off by e-book pirates.
As of 2006, none of these groups have got what they wanted, even though the Sony Reader, Google's online publishing ambitions, Amazon's forthcoming e-book store and other initiatives indicate a slow return of interest in the e-bookwagon.
Before we get down to specifics, here are two things the publishing industry might want to consider. The first is the proliferation of file-sharing networks such as Limewire, where users trade music and video files—and increasingly, share scanned or e-text versions of books. Limewire grapples with copyright (and computer virus!) issues in the same way that the music-sharing network Napster did before it and that the video-sharing network YouTube does today. You can find pirated books on Limewire—I've found everything from Jonathan Franzen's latest to the newest Harry Potter, available for illegal, free download—but users who perpetrate piracy are often reported and shut down.
Publishers need to worry far more about those users who put up scanned, pirated copies of books on bulletin boards and underground networks. If you know your way around the net, you can locate almost every major bestseller via one of these sites, though I would strongly advise against downloading pirated books on moral grounds.
In addition, the publishing industry might be forced to reconsider its old, paper-and-bookstore driven way of doing business when the current generation of computer users, used to reading on screen, uncomfortable with print books that can't be hyperlinked or plugged into the web, becomes the book buyers of the future.
It's a myth, if a well-established one, that this group of users don't read. They do, but they're choosy about how they read in a way that people over 30 find hard to comprehend. What this demographic wants is the e-reader equivalent of the i-Pod: a cheap, searchable, portable, easy-to-use device that offers an almost unlimited selection of books from a global library.
As of 2006, none of these groups have got what they wanted, even though the Sony Reader, Google's online publishing ambitions, Amazon's forthcoming e-book store and other initiatives indicate a slow return of interest in the e-bookwagon.
The closest the industry has come to delivering on this is the Sony Reader, which excited considerable interest at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair. I played with one of these gizmos and came away with mixed feelings.
In terms of look and feel, the Sony Reader scores high—it's leatherbound, book-sized, a comfortable fit in your handbag, and the specially developed e-Ink it uses is much closer to the paperback reading experience than the eye-straining computer screen reading experience.
But the only reason it even remotely resembles the i-Pod of the publishing industry is because it has no competition. The Amazon Kindle, the giant online bookstore’s e-reader, looks clunky, old-fashioned and nothing like a book in comparison.
But the Sony Reader has an irritating lag-time while pages refresh; it doesn’t allow readers to skip ahead to specific numbers, doesn’t allow annotations or marginalia and its search function is a joke at present (a future version should allow word search, Sony says). At $350, it’s far too expensive given its limited features and almost deliberately awkward controls, even for a hardcore reading addict and e-book evangelist like me.
What the Sony Reader does, however, is bring readers tantalisingly close to the Holy Grail of the e-book that’s even better than the real thing. With a few significant tweaks, any one of the big guys—Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Sony itself—could create an e-book that actually works. That would rewrite the blue-pencilled early history of electronic publishing, but will they get their act together before book pirates do?
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