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While having my lunchtime soup, I listened to Cory Doctorow being interviewed. He was talking about why he doesn't think e-book readers will really catch on. His reasons were a little bit depressing, and the diametric opposite of what most commenters on this blog seem to think.
Of course you have to remember that Cory is a sci-fi author, so you can't really use the argument that readers are traditionalists with him - because his readers certifiably aren't. But instead of appealing to the rich sense-experience of paper books, he looks at the big picture. His thinking is two-fold: firstly, reading novels isn't that popular. Reading for pleasure is a minority interest these days. The big money goes into video games and iPods, etc; So there won't be any big drive for technology to conquer the book world, because it's too small to justify the effort. His second argument is that any device that's capable of being a good reader for books will inevitably get loaded up with other features: games, a web browser, a music player, a phone, a video player and so on. And the one thing we know about those features is that they are all more popular with the average citizen than reading. And stripping those features out isn't going to work, because why would you buy the e-book reader that just displays books when someone else is offering one that does all those other things? And given the option to do those other things, we know that most people will choose them over reading. His argument is that paper books help you not to get distracted in a way that no gadget with a screen ever will. Listen here for the full interview. But the summary is that he's agreeing with all the naysayers out there, but probably for reasons you'll hate.
Comments: 3
Cory is right. The ebook reader will have uses for lawyers and other professionals who need to move around large volumes of reference material but the model of the iPod does not transfer over.
Authenticity is the key value that sells books at the moment and paper serves that authenticity very well. Secondly, with an ebook other people would not be able to see what you are reading, and I think the social display aspect of reading - on the train, on bookshelves lining the living room etc- should not be disregarded. Thirdly, when you consider the ruin unleashed on the music industry by easily diseminated digital files, the ebook would drive the price of novels etc down to zero. Also, the allure of the iPod is playlists - that is, the ability to cherry pick from artists and albums to create an experience. That doesn't transfer to books - you would not to mix and match paragraphs and pages - at best, you could use an ibook to produce a bespoke anthology - not a mainstream proposition.
Posted by: Matthew De Abaitua on November 23, 2007 04:15 PM
Exactly. The model of the iPod does not transfer, and therefore shouldn't be used as a basis for comparison. I'm not in the business of predicting trends like Cory(and most predictions are hardly accurate anyway), but I certainly would use an ereader in addition to my print books, particularly for the fiction I'm only likely to read once (light reading of any sort) or for those books that are out of print.
And whereas reading novels may not be particularly popular, I see the real strength of ebooks in the nonfiction field.
Posted by: Lee on November 23, 2007 07:25 PM
These are not reasons I hate, because they're logical and true. Good for Cory. I think it would be stupid to offer an e-reader that does more stuff than just read books, but I can't argue that that won't happen, because it inevitably will.
I agree with Matthew, though, that rather than reaching for the reading-for-pleasure market first, e-readers should try to penetrate document-heavy professions like lawyering. I work in a law firm and it never occurred to me until you said it, Matthew, just how useful that could be.
The problem is that e-readers are not going to be useful to the general public until everybody has one. At the current prices, that seems impossible.
Posted by: KatharineC on November 26, 2007 03:02 PM