will e-books ever take off?

[JR-]

every year or so there is another attempt to launch the e-book market, as if it were new, and every year it fades into obscurity.
i believe this is because books are perceived as the ultimate convenience, pick it at your leisure, leave it on the shelf, loan it to a friend, do whatever you like with it. this stands in stark contrast to the restrictive DRM to be found in encrypted e-book formats.

well here is the latest attempt from sony and waterstones:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...paperback.html

if you feel you would like to voice an opinion, comment under the linked article and make your voice heard.

i would also like to hear your thoughts here.

for myself, if i could buy e-books from amazon or waterstones in pdf format i would jump at the chance, but we need the big guns to change there tune and follow the music industry with unencrypted mp3 tracks.

[Lemur]

If they do, it will be because of one thing and one thing only: The insane price of college textbooks.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

But college textbooks aren't expensive because of the paper costs, they're expensive because students HAVE to buy them.

[Lemur]

Right, and if enterprising nerds create open-source textbooks, and Unis make it a point of competitive advantage to use them ...

[Lord Winter]

Personly I'll always be a pureist. You can't beat the feel of a real book.

[Motep]

Personly I'll always be a pureist. You can't beat the feel of a real book.

I feel much the same

[Centurio Nixalsverdrus]

Reading printed letters is much more comfortable than reading letters on a display, that's why I'd never buy an e-book.

[Marshal Murat]

Agreed.

I prefer to have a good old copy, right in my hands. It's easy on the eyes, doesn't require power, cannot be disconnected, and never freezes (unless you put it in the freezer. NB: Didn't cool down my copy of Inconvenient Truth.)

It's a win for a good tome.

[rajpoot]

As others have already said, there's nothing like a real book.....the feel of it in ones hands, can't be substituted.
But sooner or later e-books will take off, maybe someday, if we last long enough we'll see paper prices rise sky high and then...........well I anyhow hope to be gone long before that.

[CountArach]

E-Books aren't bad if you have a laser printer and are willing to print them out.

[Decker]

E-books sound nice but...who really wants to sit in front of a computer for hours on end. You get a headache and feel TOTALLY grunge on most occasions. As where books...well you can take them anywhere and read them at your leasure. Now as for college books...THAT is mightly tempting but I'd rather buy the textbook themselves as they can be a good refrence book later on.

[spmetla]

Staring at a computer screen to read hundreds of pages of a book hurts my eyes a lot more than just reading out of a regular book.

Having said that, most military manuals I read are electronic because it is easiest to get the lates manuals online than ordering via supply and there are so many that storing all those manuals would take up very limited armory space.

[Moros]

Well the only way I see them breaking trough is if they are free or really cheap in comparison to normal books. Though everyone will like normal books more, but price can be a real reason. Of course if books not just get scanned, but also made interactive (hyper link, multimedia (instead of just pictures in a travel book why not some video's?) that might help too.

E-journals or fulltext databases (Jstor for example) however seem to be a growing succes in Academic world. Well at least at the history departement. As Electronic full text makes searching for specific info easier, is always avaible (don't have to go to the library if you have some log in or proxy), and up to date. Perhaps if a larger amount of books get digitalized and added to full text databases that this might get a real break trough in the academic world. Especially as it would reduce costs to make it, and might even make it easier for Academici to write a book, as making it profitable is often difficulty (as they sell low numbers and to library's mostly). Which would give for more sources, that are easily searchable and better avaible. Which I think is a win-win situation. However if it's for pasttime activities I prefer a printed dead tree myself.

[Xiahou]

E-book readers that I've looked at have quite nice, paper-like, displays. So for me, the display is no longer a problem. No, for me the problem is format portability. Paper books will never break down, be discontinued, run out of batteries or anything else of the sort.

I'm not going to drop $300 on a fancy e-reader and then lock myself into buying books that can only be read on that device. Maybe if they started including them with print-books as a value-add or in a more open format, then I might eventually take an interest.

[Lemur]

It's true, you can't beat the battery life and portability of a paperback.

Going back to my textbook theme ...

[rajpoot]

E-Books aren't bad if you have a laser printer and are willing to print them out.

I don't know how much does it cost you to print out a page from a laser printer , but here it costs me a rupee per page, so to print a 200 page book, I'll have to spend Rs. 200, while I can easily buy it's paperback in Rs.165........

[CountArach]

I don't know how much does it cost you to print out a page from a laser printer , but here it costs me a rupee per page, so to print a 200 page book, I'll have to spend Rs. 200, while I can easily buy it's paperback in Rs.165........

I don't print off long stuff like that, just shorter books or chapters out of them, such as textbooks.

[JR-]

E-book readers that I've looked at have quite nice, paper-like, displays. So for me, the display is no longer a problem. No, for me the problem is format portability. Paper books will never break down, be discontinued, run out of batteries or anything else of the sort.

I'm not going to drop $300 on a fancy e-reader and then lock myself into buying books that can only be read on that device. Maybe if they started including them with print-books as a value-add or in a more open format, then I might eventually take an interest.

so the real answer is to provide ebooks in a portable and unencrypted pdf format, so you can read them on any device.

[ELITEofWARMANGINGERYBREADMEN88]

Maybe for college books, but other then that, I can't see myself using them.

[Cheetah]

Pergmanet will never replace marble and clay! It just does not feel the same. The weight of marble tablets, oh, the feel of carved letters! Never!!! ... Perhaps for my greek studies but only if they reduce the cost pergament!

ps. in few years time everyone and his grandmother -and I mean it seriously- will have an e-book.

[Centurio Nixalsverdrus]

Pergmanet will never replace marble and clay! It just does not feel the same. The weight of marble tablets, oh, the feel of carved letters! Never!!! ... Perhaps for my greek studies but only if they reduce the cost pergament!

ps. in few years time everyone and his grandmother -and I mean it seriously- will have an e-book.

Err no. I don't think so.

Pergament has an advance over marble: it is very light and doesn't need much space. Paper has and advance over pergament, it is much easier to produce, cheaper and easier to store.

E-books don't have an advantage over normal books. In fact they only have disadvantages: they are in different formats what makes it somewhat more difficult to read them. Reading them hurts your eyes. If you want to take them with you, you have to buy this e-book thingie. You need power supply for it. It will get broken after a couple years. And a paper book? Just read it. Or put it on your shelf and read it in 30 years. Will work without further ado. Try to use your e-book reading device in 30 years. Batteries lost their battery-liquid? Machine broken? Data vanished? There is such a huge amount of probable problems that indeed e-books will never be very much used. And last but not least: how do you want to show off to your friends what a clever educated guy you are without a bookshelf? Impossible.

[Cheetah]

Nah, pergament has no advantages over marble! A pergament can be torn, be eaten, be burned, do you really expect your pergaments to be intact in 30 years? A marble tablet on the other hand will be intact and readable not just in 30 but in 300 years! Do you really expect us to waste our money on pergament that will be a pile of rubbish in 30 years? Last but not least, how do you want to show off to your friends what a clever educated guy you are without a room full of marble tablets? Impossible. Do you really expect them to be impressed by a pile of stinking pergament?

[Ramses II CP]

Well, 'take off' is a relative term since publishing and writing themselves are in decline. Still, I put Stanza (http://www.lexcycle.com/) on my iPhone and I've read some of the free stuff off of it (Lovecraft mostly) when the idea of playing yet another 'tilt' game made me ill. Obviously I prefer print books, they're much easier to read, but the fact that these little apps are out there and being used puts e-books in the public mind at least.

I do not believe a dedicated e-book platform will ever be of much use, or popular. This isn't like music where you can cleanly rip and store all your current print books to review at will, and virtually no one is going to rebuy any significant part of their library just to have it 'on the go' all the time.

[frogbeastegg]

I'm book mad, truly completely book mad. Always have been; it's a common joke that my first word should have been "Book!". I own well over 1,000 books, I read an average of 11 a month, and when I enter a bookshop I always leave with books plural and never books singular. Heck, I'm the manager of a bookshop, that's how deep the love goes. I treat my books with the utmost loving care; I can read them many times over and they will still look brand new. I keep all of my books, except those which I have read and cannot envision myself ever touching again. It's a heart-breaking process, culling the stacks down several times a year. They may go to good causes but getting rid of books goes against a frog's nature. It's a necessity; I've already got books stored in every possible location. The tactile element of reading is important to me; I love the scent of the various inks, glues and papers, the feel of the pages, the turning of the page. I will never, ever live willingly without physical books. There's something immensely comforting about being surrounded by them.

I pre-ordered my Sony reader the day the announcement was made.

The reason I want a reader is very simple: if I can get books which I don't particularly care about keeping for the reader then I don't have to buy them, find space to keep them, and then find a way to dispose of them after I have finished reading.

There are side benefits. I don't buy hardbacks; they take up far too much space. Some of the authors I like get published in hardback, so either I wait a year or I queue up for a smelly, grotty library copy. No more! I'll download the ebook. Certain authors turn out books which are the very definition of bricks; my poor spindly wrists struggle to cope. I'll download the ebook. Not all books get published in the UK; buying an ebook will be easier and cheaper than importing - provided no regional restrictions are placed on them.

Out of print books? Yes, please! Paying many times the normal price for a badly battered manky old copy of an out of print book makes me cry.

The reader has support for PDF and other file formats. How many games come with the proper manual on PDF? Lots. It's unpleasant to read on the PC, costs a fortune to print, and is hard to reference during play. That has always irked me, and I have never found a satisfactory answer to it. The answer should be arriving in tomorrow's post - I'll transfer the manual to the reader so I can read in comfort and reference it during play. MS Word files are also supported; I do all of my writing in Word. It will be incredible to load up my own work and read it back in an environment different to that which I created it in. It will be an invaluable editing tool.

The e-ink display is a world away from a screen of any type.

I'm so excited I can't wait for mine to arrive!



I do disagree somewhat with the comments about standard books lasting for decades. That's true. Mostly. Sort of. However binding and paper quality is going down, down, deeper and down. I've got books which are less than 6 months old with yellow pages which smell unpleasant, and glue which is giving way so the outermost pages at front and back are falling out. The book I'm reading at the moment has ink which smudges like a newspaper!

At work it's not so unusual for us to unpack a week's delivery of books only to find one or two paperbacks which have the pages falling out. We've had a relatively high number of recalls on paperbacks lately too. Pages missing. Pages bound out of order. Shoddy binding on a wide scale. Upside down covers. Gold foil and other finishing effects on the cover missing. I've seen hardbacks that have been fastened into the hard cover upside down and then had the dust cover put on the wrong way up to cover for the mistake.

British published books used to be famous for being of high quality and more expensive, while American ones were a lot cheaper but poorly put together. Now British ones retain the high price and have quality that's nearly as low as the American mass market paperbacks.

If the binding and paper are of good quality, and the volume is cared for, then they can and do last for hundreds of years. Myself, I can't see my copy of Shogun lasting a decade.

[JR-]

interesting post about the quality of modern books, reminds me very much of the early days of the LCD screen.

When they first arrived they were ferociously expensive, low resolution, small, dim, with terrible viewing angles and bad refresh rate. their only advantage over a CRT was that they took up less desk space.

Now, time has allowed LCD screens to overcome all these shortcomings, but what has been interesting is that CRT's have moved down market in response to downward pressure from LCD's.

You simply cannot buy a good CRT these days because no-one makes them as they would not sell against a comparable LCD. No longer can you find 20" CRT's with trinitron style flat-screens capable of fantastic colour reproduction at 2048x1600 whilst maintaining a flicker free 85Hz refresh rate with amazing viewing angles.

I wonder if the same thing will happen with print books in response to ebooks?

Still i will not buy ebooks while they are encumbered with DRM.

[FactionHeir]

Hmm personally I am of two minds.

Books to read for leisure or just for a course, I prefer as hard copy because you can mark where you got to and highlight sections, make scribbles to remind you of things and stick notes on them. On a pdf this isn't easily doable. Also, hardcopies don't crash and you can't accidentally delete them. You can also find them more easily as opposed to filing through huge folders and pdfs.

Now, scientific journals and articles I prefer in pdf format. I just don't like searching for volume X issue Y. Much more convenient to get it from the database and download it, read it, etc. That's because there's so many of them and very similar at times. Also, sometimes you want to seafch for specific words. Not feasible to do that manually on a hardcopy, so the search within text from Windows is really helpful here. The added benefit is that I don't havbe to leave my home to go to the library for them that way either. And I can get them whenever I want, wherever I want.

[Moros]

Now, scientific journals and articles I prefer in pdf format. I just don't like searching for volume X issue Y. Much more convenient to get it from the database and download it, read it, etc. That's because there's so many of them and very similar at times. Also, sometimes you want to seafch for specific words. Not feasible to do that manually on a hardcopy, so the search within text from Windows is really helpful here. The added benefit is that I don't havbe to leave my home to go to the library for them that way either. And I can get them whenever I want, wherever I want.

Tell me about it. seconded mate!

[frogbeastegg]

I prefer as hard copy because you can mark where you got to and highlight sections, make scribbles to remind you of things and stick notes on them.

:froggy goes into some kind of convulsion, trying to spit up blood and scream "GAH!!" at the same time: You monster!



I have my Reader now and, having read 2 1/2 books, I'm very pleased with it. It does precisely what I want. Hehe, it's got 49 books on it already, all ones I don't care too much about so if I can't read them in 3 years time then I won't mind. The amount of space that has saved me!

It's surprising how close this is to reading a normal book. It retains the same form, the button to turn the page is right where I'd turn pages on a real book, and the e-ink screen does look very close to standard paper. The way the screen goes entirely black for half a second when you turn the page took a bit of getting used to, as did the lack of a second 'page' off to the side. Getting books downloaded and transferred across to it is a doddle, as is deleting off content you don't want.

Heh, I went to Waterstones yesterday and left with another 2 bags of books. So the reader hasn't endangered the ordinary book or bookshop where I am concerned :read:



Does anyone know of any sites selling ebooks to the UK other than waterstones.com?

[CBR]

This might be the thing I have been waiting for.


CBR

[rajpoot]

Nice find CBR, this's something totally new, I've got to say......looks far more promising than you average e-book reader it does.