O’Reilly on E-Books
Tons of buzz about e-books. I posted awhile back about my belief that e-books are stalling because of lack of publisher protections. Washington Post, on the other hand, suggests that e-books stalled specifically because vendors spent too much time trying to make publishers happy. The Shifted Librarian figures that e-books are not really a replacementfor paper books anyway. Mitch Wagner is still saying that users don’t want e-books either (at least not until the technology improves to provide a more pleasant experience, perhaps in a year or two). Jon Udell is saying much the same thing,and adds that content publishers will have to be more creative to sell their content in the future.
Which is where Tim O’Reilly comes in. Tim’s business is book publishing, so he has some credibility when talking about the perspective of a publisher.Tim doesn’tspend much time talking about reasons that e-books are stalled, but instead points out that e-books are an independent information delivery mechanism, and will have some interesting possibilities independent of paper or audio books. This kind of fits in with what Udell is saying — as publishers get better at taking advantage of the new modality, just selling a PDF file with the paper book contents won’t cut it anymore.
From my own personal perspective, though, it’s almost impossible to get the titles I want whenever I look for e-book or audio book versions. I have purchased a few e-books, and enjoyed reading them on both PocketPC and laptop. I am sure that the experience will get even better when the TabletPC devices become available, but for me the technology is not the limiting factor. Audio books are a good example, too, in my opinion. Audio books are quite useful for cases where you need to have your eyes occupied on something other than reading (like driving). I’ve purchased and “read” many audio books, and the technologyworks just fine. My experience with audio books got better when I bought a variable-speed tape player (so I could read faster), but again technology was not a limiting factor. The biggest factor limitingme from buying more audio books and e-books is simply that nobody is willing to sell me the ones I want. And I think that the reason there is so little book content available electronically is the same reason that so few audio books are available as MP3, and the same reason that so few music CDs are available as MP3 — publishers are scared.
Personally, I would love to see publishers start to compete for my dollars based on taking advantage of e-book specific capabilities. But I would be happy just to see them compete for dollars based on existing content. I would love to get all of my books (paper or audio) and music digitally, even without technology advancesor content specialization. But the content has to be available for that to happen.