December 11th, 2009|1:13pm.
The idea of ebooks is certainly nothing new. Good electronic ink technology has been in development for a while and from what I've heard the Kindle and the Nook are fine devices. The idea of being able to distribute books the same way music and movies are now commonly distributed seems like an excellent idea, but I just can't get that excited about it.
Part of me is worried that this is the same apathy I felt about iPods back in the day. An mp3 player seemed like a good idea, but my Diskman worked just fine and I wasn't in a big rush to spend $300 to listen to my music. Now, the benefits seem pretty obvious and the digital format makes a lot of sense for music. Like many people, I resisted the loss of a tangible product that went along with my music and this is a pretty common argument for resisting ebooks now.
In many ways I think this is a more justifiable argument when talking about books than it is for music or movies. When you buy a CD or DVD, you're not actually in contact with that disk while you're listening or watching, you're listening to speakers or headphone or watching a screen, some sort of delivery system for the media. With a book, you actually hold the book, turn the pages, maybe scribble in the margins. Books feel different and come in different sizes. Books (just as a vehicle for the literature inside them) have more dimension and personality than CD cases or even record sleeves. You don't always sit and look at the cover art while you're listening to an album, but you're always looking at a book when you're reading it. I think this physical relationship is going to be harder to overcome than it was for music and movies.
That said, the idea of having a lot of books in a very small package is really appealing. I love reading on the train to work and always have a book in my bag. When traveling longer distances, it would be great to be able to bring as many books as I wanted for a long plane ride without the weight of dead trees in my bag. I've had to read a bunch of academic papers for school and it would be nice to load all those up on an ebook reader rather than printing them out to read on the go. Being able to do full text searches on all these things would be great, too.
Like most awesome ideas, DRM is one of the main hurdles preventing ebooks from being totally awesome. Just let me buy something that I can read on whatever I want and don't mess with it after I've bought it. Also, offer ebook versions of books I've already bought (Amazon, B&N, I'm looking at you). Take my whole history of Amazon purchases and let me have an ebook version of whatever books I've bought. This would be the best equivalent of ripping CD's that you already own. Don't lock me into a single device with one format (think about how many times Sony has shot themselves in the foot with this mentality).
I really want to like ebooks. I think the Nook looks cool, if it were $100, I'd probably buy one right now. But there's still something that just doesn't feel right about them yet. I don't know if this is just a natural resistance to a disruptive change in media or if the whole concept is still just not quite ripe. I really hope ebooks keep maturing and work out their awkward adolescent kinks. I'd really like to have all 7 Harry Potter books in one small, discrete device.
I am not a big fan of eBooks. Your comparison to the iPods of the world intrigued me, but there is a difference in how a person consumes music and how one consumes literature. I think it really comes down to the time investment and the volume of media you need on you to fill up your free time. Most of us aren't reading more than a few books at a time. Even if you do have five or six going, it still takes a significant amount of time to finish them. (One book a day, if you're really quick?) Music, on the other hand, is consumed much faster. One CD is, maximum, a little over an hour, right? That's only if you listen to an entire album at a time. Each song is 2-5 minutes on average and how many of us live on the shuffle setting? If I had to carry around the CD of each song I listen to in a given day... well, it'd be a lot of CD's. So, where you save yourself the space of three or four books with an eReader, you save yourself... dozens or hundreds of CD's!
I think that they're being marketed the wrong way. I would consider getting an eReader for something like a magazine or newspaper subscription. Something that I could read through quickly and was updated regularly. If you read the paper every day, why not just download it podcast style. Same thing for monthly magazines or TV guide or your favorite tabloid. Print media is dying out anyway thanks to the internet. Here's a way to convert traditional print media to an electronic format. Then maybe I'd consider putting a novel or two on there as an aside. Who knows, maybe they're just doing it backwards. Sell the eReaders as Book devices and then start introducing subscription content later.
Long story short, it's an interesting product, but for me, personally, not worth the money or the hassle. One last difference between the iPod and the eReader. People were already used to batteries in their discmen. Charging your book seems like kind of a hassle.