The headline may seem obvious, no matter of you understand that to mean either a piece of equipment to have the file loaded onto, or a person to enjoy the act of reading the story within said file. Even both make the headline seem a bit obvious.
However, until someone comes up with a piece of equipment that is actually useful, the people will not come to accept that e-books are anything other than the spawn of Satan, which is what they’re widely considered to be now.
So far, there are only two really big-scale famous pieces of equipment that people use: the Amazon Kindle, and the Sony Reader [middle of image, right]. Yes, there are others, but those are the most common ones. Oddly, while the Sony Reader in its varied forms has been available for years now, you still cannot get the Kindle in Canada (publishing rights and 3GS network leasing are the stumbling blocks).
While people in the USA, and increasing numbers elsewhere around the world, come to love the e-book formats – for there are more file formats than companies making units to display them on – I find it incredible they are considering that they’ve spent a great deal of money just for the opportunity to spend more money on getting the books themselves. The Sony Reader is available in different models and colours, but you’re going to spend $200 US to get one, plus shipping, taxes and so on. Books thereafter are going to run you anywhere from free in some cases (especially if you’re willing to put up with really crappy formatting of really old books through the Project Gutenberg site) all the way to about the same as the hardback editions’ RRP. The Kindle is about $280 US, and the books have the same price range.
Important here is to ignore the various ways that both units can use various files, but not each others’ native file formats. The point that this is yet another inherent win for the paper-based book format is a fight for another day. Oh yes, I’ll get to that one eventually.
See, and here’s my main complain with any of the extant e-readers, it costs a small fortune to get something that doesn’t do anything else! Were I to have need for a mobile phone (Jennifer is using what was once mine, seeing as how I never leave the house these days), an iPhone or Palm Pre would be pretty useful, as both they and the Blackberry have Shortcovers applications available for them so I could read books / submissions in bed, on transit, or even whilst sitting in a sushi restaurant downtown. Sure, I could use the little Asus netbook I’ve got, except that the screen is oriented horizontally and it’s a bugger to set up and not be bothered by everyone and their dog about ‘how cute that is!’ It’s also a bit heavy to ideally use for this purpose, and it shouldn’t be used when turned on its end so the screen is up-and-down like a real book is.
So… the iPhone, iPod Touch, Palm Pre, and Blackberry have one very distinct advantage over the expensive e-book readers available: they do things other than act as e-readers as well: take photographs, record video, handle e-mail with some sort of QWERTY keyboard (sometimes dedicated buttons, sometimes on the screen), let you browse the web, watch videos, play tunes, act as an appointment book, hold your contact list, play games; all of them, except for the iPod Touch, even operate as a mobile phone! What do the Kindle and Sony Reader do? Play tunes. They both handle RSS feeds in various ways, and the Kindle lets you $ub$cribe to The New York Times and a few other new$paper$, but that’s basically where you stop.
Perhaps it’s just me, but doesn’t everyone prefer to have fewer things that do more stuff, than the reverse?
When I got my first mobile, I wanted something as simple as possible because the other things models could do at that point were basically useless (“it’s got a tip calculator! because maths are hard!’), or they did mildly useful things badly (‘the camera has a massive 0.5 megapixels for that wonderful 110 cartridge “box brownie” effect!’). Hey, gimme a phone with a good signal and solid sound coming in and going out! I cried. Size didn’t matter to me either: if it’s too small or thin I could lose the thing, or have it fall out of my pocket and I wouldn’t hear it hit the floor or notice the weight not being there.
When I examined the whole question of whether or not to make e-books part of my business model, the only thing that really made sense to me was Shortcovers. The reasoning seemed – and still seems – simple: people want to read books, whatever form they’re in. Right now, all that takes is a block of paper in your hand; job done right there. If someone’s going to provide an alternative, people aren’t broadly wiling to part with multiple hundreds of dollars merely to have a new way to place words in front of their eye-bones. Books do that pretty well now.
However… if you can get access to literally hundreds of thousands of different titles at a moment’s notice for less than a paper book costs, merely by using your mobile phone – which more people have than land-lines these days – then not only is the environment better off for the lack of paper used and no trucks or rail used to ship things, you have the ability to hear about a good book from someone and get a copy for yourself before you’ve forgotten about it. Shortcovers does that on all the major ‘platforms’ as people like to say these days. This is filled to the brim with “win” in my mind, both as a publisher and a lover of tales.
It’s possible to enjoy it while still coveting your complete set of The Pan Books of Horror Stories. Some books I’m happy to read once and then… then what? I can’t bear to throw them away, so Bookcrossing is the answer, I guess…
The only ‘down side’ to this e-book thing – and I don’t see it as one, frankly – is that it doesn’t support “collector’s editions” of books (numbered, slip-cased, signed by the author/illustrator/guy who glued the binding). There have been a few number of titles that I thought “damn, I’d love to read that” but was unable to because I couldn’t justify spending over $250 for a copy, and there was no edition other than the ‘extra-special über-edition’ made available. Ergo: suddenly there’s a class-based availability to books again, just like in the middle ages. Sometimes you don’t even hear about some cool writers because they’re published by small presses who don’t have distribution deals with massive chains so readers who would love the books never see them on high-street shop shelves next to the mysteries of the Dan Browns, Christopher Fowlers, and Jeffrey Archers (only one of which is worth the candle).
Suddenly the playing field is level again, or less hilly at least.
The biggest competition to any of the above-mentioned units is one which doesn’t exist yet: the Apple Tablet with touch-sensitive 10½” screen (and little else physically present) [image of non-existent hardware, left]. A close second would be the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch, plus any other ‘smartphone’ such as the Palm Pre, Blackberry, and so on; all of which have the distinct advantage of actually being currently available outside of testing labs.
Officially, Apple doesn’t even admit they’re attempting to develop a tablet-based mobile computing product. They said the same thing six about a rumoured music player about six months before revealing the very first model of the now ubiquitous iPod.
The name of the company in Mainland China responsible for building a rumoured 300,000 – 400,000 of the iTable units is Foxconn. Once you get to that level of detail, you can count on these things getting to market, probably in March of next year.
This may very well be the beast that turns people on to electronic books, because you’re not tied to a unit which is essentially useless for any other use. It also has a big enough screen that no-one can complain that they can’t read more than two sentences before they have to hit NEXT PAGE, which quickly gets a bit old.
This new table thing that Apple isn’t going to release in March (probably around $800 and using the iPhone version of Mac’s OSX) is going to make it possible to do everything the iPhone does for people, yet also gives you a screen and QWERTY keyboard you don’t have to squint to see.
The future looks bright, people. This really is Buck Rogers stuff. See the positive side: thousands of inexpensive books you’ve never heard of being literally a few taps of the finger away from your reading ability.
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