Opinion: David Coursey's column "E-Book Publishing Is Foundering for Good Reason" draws a heartfelt disagreement from Jim Louderback, who reads his REB-1200 daily.Aaah, what does David Coursey know about e-books? In his recent column, he decries the current state of electronic books, citing eight things wrong with e-books and only two right.
But Coursey's view of e-books—why they failed, and what makes a good one—is skewed by his own personal biases.
To David, an e-book is simply a container for words and pictures—an easy way to move it from the publisher to his home printer.
David misses the point—and the potential—of e-books because he can't grok the concept of actually reading something on a computer screen. For him, paper is the only medium for reading, and thus e-books need to be short, concise and easy to print.
I reviewed the first dedicated e-book reader—the Rocket e-book—and many of the flawed follow-ons, including the color REB-1200, the Franklin e-book reader and many more.
After using them to read a wide range of subjects, I concluded that they were destined for failure as well—and so they were.
Why did e-books die? Not because reading on a digital screen is bad, or the form factor poor.
They died because they had no clear advantage over paper books.
Any new technology needs at least two fundamental advantages over what it aims to replace (I modestly call this Louderback's Law); the e-book had but one: you could read it at night in bed without waking your wife.
There were a lot of countervailing disadvantages. E-books cost the same as paper books, which meant more publisher profit, but no customer advantage.
Books could not be shared or loaned to friends. And (except for early Rocket e-books) you couldn't drop your own content onto an e-book and read it.
Click here to read about Adobe's decision to close its Digital Media Store, which sells e-books.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the scrapheap.
Once Gemstar (who bought up both the Rocket and the REB line) discontinued the hardware, they magnanimously gave away the publishing tools and eliminated the DRM.
Like a phoenix, the platform went from stillborn to a wraith-like shadowy existence.
I'm now the proud owner of an REB-1200, and I read with it almost every day.
It's a mostly ideal e-book reader: The screen is legible and bright, the compact flash card holds 20 or 30 full-length books, and the battery life is eight hours or more.
I purchase books at half-price or less from Baen books and read them voraciously.
I even snag unprotected content—long form—from the Internet and drop it onto the e-book reader.
E-books have a long life ahead of them—if the companies can just get over their need for restrictive DRM, and usurious content pricing.
With the right form-factor (note to Microsoft: Pick up an REB-1200 on eBay as a model for your new reader), e-books can be better than print.
Hopefully, with new display technologies, and cheaper devices that will happen.
Next Page: Let me tell you what's good about e-books.
But articles like David's don't help. So to set the record straight, I want to counter a number of David's eight reasons why e-books suck.
1. The most important issue remains the lack of an excellent platform… Most people have no interest in "curling up with a warm laptop."
I agree with David here. Laptops and PDAs—designed for other functions—just aren't right for e-books. But with a dedicated lightweight reader, curling up with an e-book can be a joy. You can read with one hand instead of two, in low- or no-light situations. An excellent hardware platform exists—but it was killed by onerous DRM.
2. E-books are not for recreational reading. Want to "read" a book on a computer? Visit Audible.com and download an audiobook for your PDA or MP3 device. It's a lot more fun to have someone read to you.
That's just wrong. The right e-book hardware, married with great content, makes an e-book just as much "fun" as a regular book, and far better than listening to someone drone on and on.
3. Publishers don't seem to understand that electronic books need to be short. You can't just force-fit traditional books into electronic book jackets.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. I've happily read 1,500-page e-books. It's a device issue, not a medium issue.
4. Proper formatting is critical for e-books… If I were doing an e-book, I'd start by working with the designer as soon as I had a good content idea.
I disagree. Just as most regular books are a stream of text, e-books work just fine like that as well. Good formatting can help, but it is not required. The dance of words on screen can be equally as transcendent as the dance of words on paper.
5. Electronic books need to be timely—the magazine article analogy again—and inexpensive. Five dollars seems like a fair price for 80 pages and immediate delivery.
They don't need to be timely—the classics read just as well as "The Da Vinci Code."
But we agree on price. No e-book should cost more than $5—and many of them should be free.
Baen books, for example, entices readers with free e-books, and then once they are hooked, charges them for the next books in a series. Even so, they charge half or less of the printed book price.
I agree wholeheartedly with David's last two points. We need better reader hardware and software—or a return to the REB-1200's fine design.
I dream about that device, married to a digital-paper-like screen that looks great in all lighting, and sips power only to refresh the page—displaying a page costs nothing.
And the publishing infrastructure is the big blue meanie in this story.
They insist on restrictive DRM, on charging full price, and on treating e-books as the idiot step-child of printed books.
That's the same attitude we saw with music and are seeing now with movies.
Now that music costs as little as 25 cents a song (which it does at eMusic.com) or under $10 a month for all you can eat, music piracy is less of a threat.
The same thing will happen with books. If publishers don't wake up to the electronic opportunity, more and more books will be illegally traded online (it's happening already).
And that means a similar crisis is brewing for the publishing industry. It's a few years away, but it is coming.
Because despite David's exhortations, e-books really do work. And once someone releases the iPod version of an e-book, the entire world will implode.
Until then, I just hope my REB-1200 doesn't break.
