Participo

Thoughts on ebooks

Permalink 1 comments, add yours

I've been digesting the news this week (and rumoured for the last 12 mths), that Amazon is launching its long awaited ebook reader:

I'd written a few emails to a geek mailing list, before the device was officially announced and after the first wave of histrionic blog reviews came out. I thought I'd reuse those emails, edited a little, as they sum up my thoughts around this (to me) new area of interest in ebooks.

The first mass market ebook market?
I think the 'Kindle' is interesting for a bunch of reasons - mainly because (arguably) this may see the first successful (in mass market terms) attempt to define the ebook market...certainly Amazon seem to have delivered a content<>hardware integration proposition that's a lot better wrapped than Sony's Reader and ebook store. The ability for anyone to submit their text for sale into Kindle ebook format is potentially a fantastic disinter-mediation strategy for direct publishing.

The DRM problem?
Unfortunately, Amazon's ebooks are restricted to their particular flavour of DRM for the Kindle, rather than letting me consume them on my OLPC (or whatever). Here are two well argued opposing views on Kindle's adoption of DRM argument:

• Aaron Pressman's positive user review (via Rex Hammock)
• Mark Pilgrim - The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) is a riposte of the Kindle's DRM.

I personally don't like DRM - I don't see it as the price of convenience, in fact, quite the opposite; it creates a major inflexibility in future purchasing (I've 'lost' tracks I've bought from iTunes because I'm on my 6th laptop, for example). I do think think Amazon's central storage is useful. I do like the concept of 'social DRM' where my name/email gets stamped into every page - acts as a disincentive to being 'cheap' by sharing texts.

The OLPC alternative
I've just bought, via Evan in the States, an OLPC, through the Buy two, get one promotion. The OLPC is the same price ($400) as the Kindle so, not withstanding that the $400 actually bought two OLPCs, it's a reasonable price comparison.

The OLPC, I hope, will make a great ebook device (I bought it primarily as a travel laptop and PDF/text reading device), as it has an incredibly high resolution screen that works really well in daylight (I've seen the OLPC screen in action at Reboot this summer - its screen is fantastic).

The OLPC is also pretty rugged and has 'normal' laptop functionality as well. And yet no one seems to be talking that much about the OLPC as ebook reader. (update - Brewster Kahle has been talking about the OLPC's superiority as an ebook device.)

In terms of alternative dedicated ebook devices, I've spent some time looking at the Sony Reader, iRex Iliad and the recent Booken, but on 'the blogs' there's not much talk about the pre-existing ebook devices from Sony, Irex or Booken either. A triumph of PR from Amazon?

In fact, I've seen the iPhone mentioned much more frequently as a comparative device to the Kindle (which I don't think takes into account the unique 'live bookstore' and always on, free connectivity proposition of the Kindle). But the iPhone (and any device) could display text well (the iPhone, particularly.

There does seem to have been some commercial interest in the iphone/pod platform as a reading device - I was pleasantly suprised at Harper Collins 'iphone/ipod touch' optimised preview portal; nice interaction design, book previews etc, until I realised that they display images of pages, which fails miserably on zoomed views on that nice high res iPod screen :-(

Why are ebooks so hard?
Let's see - authors write on a PC in text, editors review text, it goes into the print run as text files - surely ebooks can't be that hard to maintain in actual text? The ease with which Kindle owners can roundtrip document conversions by email, and the self-publishing opportunities would suggest the ebook format is a political/commercial issue, not technological.

My personal experience is that that on other current devices, ebook reading is pretty dismal.

For copied text or long documents, I've not had a good experience with any ebook format/reader like MobiPocket et al - I've resorted to PDFs on screen, plain text on my Nokia (a pain in the ass) and well, real paper books for everything else.

It seems the current e-ink technology only handles natively rendered fonts effectively - the screens either need to be larger, or the PDF needs conversion - both Sony and Kindle require PDF conversion. The Booken supports PDF, I presume through zooming? I don't know how good it's support for PDF is.

The technology of books
It's interesting that Bezos argues about the 'future' of the book, and the limitations of existing technology, and yet if you pivot your view of the 'tech of books' as Pilgrim does, the Kindle looks backward.

Perhaps it's more useful to look at books as an anachronism based on the limitation of paper binding, volume and print - and focus on the transport of text and ideas...

I see the current benefits of ebooks on devices such as the Kindle already superseding as a technology for reference/non-fiction books (bookmarking, searching, annotation, errata updates etc.)

But I don't see those benefits for novels, where portability, price, disposability/transfer/gifting is far more important than ebook enhanced functions like annotation.

Although I have a nostalgia for jacket design, the physicality of pages etc, I know that I could quickly lose that - 'book nostalgia' is not a barrier to adoption for me - I don't miss LPs, or CDs for that matter.

But I don't see Kindle, Sony Reader, Iliad et al creating a '9x as good' in terms of ease of use that current 'text technology' provides.

As an aside, amazingly, for a Sony device, their new 505 Reader is $100 cheaper, more open (limited PDF format support, for example) and has better screen/display technology. Obviously no wireless connectivity.

I'm still sticking with my argument that the OLPC will outperform any current ebook device, both from a technical and an 'openness' perspective.

Books are unlike CDs/records in that they are immediately consumable within their own technology - they don't need 'playing' on any other device - they are their own device.

And for that reason, the Kindle is more booklike than other readers.