Author Nick Hornby posted an entry on his blog this week enumerating the reasons that eBooks are doomed. Hornby is an acclaimed author, and has written several successful novels that have been adapted to films (Fever Pitch, Figh Fidelity and About a Boy).
Comparing books to music, Hornby gives the following concerns about the viability of eBooks:
1) Book readers like books, whereas music fans never had much affection for CDs;
2) People don’t buy many books. Seven per person per year;
3) The advantages of the liad and the Kindle - that you can take vast numbers of books away with you - are of no interest to the average book-buyer;
4) Book-lovers are always late adapters, and generally suspicious of new technology.
Nick is missing some of the subtle and game changing aspects of eBooks. There are lots of reasons that eBooks make sense for both readers and publishers, and Hornby, as an author, is in the group that should be most excited about this new platform.
1) Hornby’s reasoning, that the average reader only buys 7 books a year, doesn’t account for the fact that owning an eBook reader increase the number of books readers buy. The Amazon Kindle allows readers to sample the first 30 pages or so of the books that it sells.
This concept eBook reader from researchers at the University of Maryland and UC Berkeley shows some novel ways of interacting with eBook hardware. One idea that seems interesting is a reader with two sides. Flip the reader over in one direction and it goes to the next page. Flip it over in other direction and it flips back. This concept has a ways to go however. Being a Kindle user myself, I can’t see people wanting to pretend to flip a page when they could just hit a button. See for yourself in the video below:
Cory Doctorow’s new young adult novel, Little Brother, is now available as a free download under a creative commons license. If you read this blog much, you know that I love creative commons and ebooks. The two go together like peanut butter and chocolate. You might know Cory from BoingBoing.net or his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you have a Kindle or Sony Reader, give this book a read. And if you like it, tell people. This model for publishing needs to be supported. [Update: Doctorow has also set up a program that allows readers to donate copies of the book to classrooms. If you like the book, and want to give back, this is a great way to do it.]
Little Brother » Download for Free: “These downloads are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which lets you share it, remix it, and share your remixes, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis. Some people don’t understand why I do this — so check out this post if you want my topline explanation for why I do this crazy thing.”
For those of you that have been waiting for the Amazon to start shipping Kindles again, now is the time. I have to admit, I haven’t been using mine much lately, but it is still a pretty slick piece of technology and a sign of things to come.
More creative commons content for your Kindle or Sony Reader.
Maureen F. McHugh’s speculative fiction collection MOTHERS & OTHER MONSTERS has been released online by Small Beer Press as a free Creative Commons download.
Small Beer is knocking them out of the park with CC releases by some of science fiction’s most talented, most brilliant short fiction writers. An entire Maureen McHugh collection online gratis is a watershed event.
This design concept for an eBook reader does a much better job than the Kindle or Sony Reader at emulating the feel of a real book. The leather cover is low tech, but appears to give the device a more comfortable book-like interface. Amazon and Sony should be paying attention to this, since a huge barrier to adoption of the Kindle and Sony 505 readers is how different they are from traditional books. People have to be able to imagine themselves using these devices.
The concept also uses an overlaid touch screen (with multi-touch) for simplified navigation. While this would be an obvious improvement over the current options, I am assuming that the cost involved would be prohibitive for now. Also, with the slow refresh time of e-ink screens, I am not sure touch screens would add the value that some would expect.
The New York Times is running an article today in its technology blog speculating that Apple is working on its own eBook reader. Steve Jobs has publicly stated that he thinks eBooks aren’t going any where. In his words “most Americans don’t read.” John Markoff at the New York Times thinks Jobs is secretly cooking up a Kindle killer. Having been sold on the Kindle and seeing how great it is to read on, I think there might be something to Markoff’s claim. I have heard a number of people say, I will be ready to move to ebooks when Apple puts out a product.
Considering how similar the ebook sales model is to iTunes, it seems hard to believe that Apple is not working on something. They already sell movies, tv shows, and music through their site. Their users already use Itunes and know how to sync their devices. The infrastructure is already in place, all they need is to create the device and secure licenses to the books.
You have to admit it is a little over the top for Steve Jobs to claim Americans don’t read. Apple’s segment of the computer market is on average more educated and literate than your the other computer company’s. This may be a byproduct of Apple’s pricing (more educated people make more money). Apple has to know that its customers read. I agree with the NYT, I think Steve’s got something up his sleeve and is trying to generate a little misdirection. Click “more” to for some excerpts and a link to the NYT article:
Some of you know that I am a big fan of my Amazon Kindle. What you don’t know is that my wife prefers the Sony Reader.In this showdown, we go husband versus wife in a battle royal comparing the strengths and weaknesses of each device from our unique perspectives. Game On:
My Arguments:
I believe in substance over style and the Kindle is a superior device to the Sony Reader.
Wireless. The wireless functionality puts the Kindle in its own class.Wireless is the kind of essential functionality that people will eventually take for granted as eBook readers become more mainstream.“Mommy, tell me again what it was like when you were a kid and people connected their devices to a computer with a cable.”I am a technology junky and even I don’t like the hassle of having to find a cable and plugging my devices into the computer. I can browse a huge library of books and have them delivered wirelessly to my device.The eInk technology that powers both devices is cool, but by itself it doesn’t do much more than a regular book.Wireless connectivity gives Kindle users instant access to Amazon’s entire library of ebooks, which is the kind of technology that borders on magic.
Better Conversion.Amazon makes it easy to get your own content on the Kindle.They give users an email
address linked directly to the device. This means if you email a Word document or a PDF to yourusername@kindle.com it automatically is converted and sent wirelessly to your device.The conversion of PDFs runs an optical character recognition on the document and creates clean crisp text for the book.Amazon also automatically recognizes the table of contents and maps it to the various part of the book.Before I bought the Kindle, I tried putting a few PDF’s on my wife’s Sony Reader, and they were illegible.The Sony was displaying the pages as graphics instead of text, which on the small screen just didn’t work.The Kindle’s high quality conversion means that you aren’t as locked-in to Amazon’s ebook store.A couple days ago I downloaded a science fiction book called Accelerando by Charlie Stross. What’s great about that is that Accelarando is published under a Creative Commons license, which means I can read it for free or even give a copy to a friend. If you are interested, you can download a copy here, friend).Moving Accelarando onto the Kindle was as easy as emailing it to myself.I really hope this kind of functionality helps people like Stross succeed. I am a few chapters into the book and it is outstanding.Sending books to yourself wirelessly costs ten cents, but you can email files to yourusername@free.kindle.com and they will reply to your email with converted files you can move to the Kindle by USB for free.
Hand made Kindle case designed to look like a book - MobileRead Forums: “Hand made Kindle case designed to look like a book
Check out this great case for a Kindle made by a member of the MobileRead Forums, artsci.
While I love my new Kindle, I found the case very disappointing. A search of the Web revealed no third-party cases of any kind, so I decided to make my own. Since I know a bit about book making techniques, I decided to make a case that looked like a fine book that when opened revealed the Kindle — a kind of old world, new world idea. I started with a lovely leather book cover hand made in Florence for a calendar, cut out the calendar, added some marbleized paper for the end papers, and used gold leaf to create the illusion of gllded pages when the book is closed. The Kindle slides into a felt-lined holder which secures it tightly in place. Some photos are provided below.
Now that I’ve made one, I’ve learned a few tricks that will make improvements possible on the next one, which I’m starting in a few days.
Some photos are provided below. I love the illusion of an old book masking the Kindle, and I’ve already fooled some friends with it. If anyone is interested in how this was done, let me know and I’ll post detailed instructions.
Here are several shots of the case closed.
Surprise, there’s a Kindle what appears to be classic book.
Image via Wikipedia
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1) Hornby’s reasoning, that the average reader only buys 7 books a year, doesn’t account for the fact that owning an eBook reader increase the number of books readers buy. The Amazon Kindle allows readers to sample the first 30 pages or so of the books that it sells.