Barnes & Noble Inc., the nation's largest bookstore chain, is spurning the Sony Reader, a new electronic device cited as a potential turning point for the tiny e-book market.I really can't blame them; they got a bit burned during the first wave of e-book hoopla, so it's easy to forgive them for being a bit gun-shy this time around.
On the subject of e-books, let me weigh in with my two cents (adjusted for inflation).
Back in the late 1990s, I covered the "e-book beat" for Micro Publishing News and got to try out firsthand all (or most) of the myriad e-book readers that had proliferated at the time--including the Microsoft Reader, the Adobe eBook Reader, and the Gemstar eBook, among others. The first two were basically applications that allowed for (supposedly) comfortable book reading on a laptop computer. It didn't entirely live up to its billing, and I never got into them because a laptop computer is still a bulky thing to lug around when all one wants to do is read a book. The Gemstar eBook was an electronic e-book reader about the size of a large hardcover book and was unimpressive on many levels.
I also had one of the second-generation Handspring Visor PDAs (remember them?) which ran the Palm OS. Palm had a software-based e-book reader (cleverly called the Palm Reader) which I kind of liked--reading books on it wasn't a bad experience, but my real beef was with the Visor itself: the batteries were always dying--even when the thing wasn't turned on. I would go to turn it on, the batteries would be dead, and I'd have to reinstall everything from the installation CD, meaning that any e-books I bought (if I had not backed them up to a PC) were gone. The Visor now sits in a trunk in the basement, along with other ghosts of technology past, like my vast collection of SCSI cables, VGA monitor adapters, a 28.8Kbps modem dating from 1994, a 2X external CD burner, the antenna that came with the TV I bought in 1997, and a variety of other objects whose exact purpose has been lost to the mists of time.
I am dubious that the Sony reader will the "killer app" for e-books, for the simple reason that the book-reading market is changing such that books are increasingly being bought and read by people who really like books and find electronic alternatives anathema. It's a tactile, "look and feel" thing which I share in part (but words are words and I'm more concerned with the content itselt than the mechanism by which that content is delivered), but the essential point is that the kinds of people who readily adopt electronic gizmos and gadgets--particularly younger people--are not big book readers (that's a vast generalization but is borne out in part by empirical observation). And when you consider the extent to which people multitask media--surfing the net while listing to an iPod while IMing while watching TV, etc.--it's hard to incorporate a book into that media mix, because books arguably require a greater level of undivided attention than other media. (I've tried--while watching sports or other TV programs that are not on DVD or recorded I usually read during commercials and it's not always easy. One ends up reading the same sentence 20 times.) Magazines and other "bite-size" content delivery mechanisms are better-suited to the kinds of media multitasking that people increasingly engage in. This is why I say that the biggest threat to printed books is not any kind of electronic alternative but rather the decline in the reading of book-length documents. Like most media shifts, this won't happen today or tomorrow, but will be generational in nature. I've been saying this for about a decade now and I remain ever more convinced this will be the case.
As for e-books themselves, I will probably check out the Sony Reader. But it's funny: there is always the sense that if e-books come on ther market, people think that there will eventually be no other alternative, and that they will only have to read printed books or e-books. The printed book or the e-book is not an either/or proposition, but rather both serve important purposes, just like the audio book hasn't completely replaced the printed book and serves an important purpose for those who want to "read" while driving (and if it keeps them off a goddamn cellphone while driving, I say it serves an immeasurably useful purpose). In fact, the reason I liked the PDA-based e-book was that it made it easy to carry books around when I traveled. (As someone who has read the hardcover edition of David McCulloch's Truman while straphanging on the NYC subway--which was great for building upper-body strength--I can't emphasize the weight advantage of the e-book enough.) In fact, the e-book is simply the extention of a decision I already make when choosing which book(s) to read: when I travel or otherwise go out (I often read a book while waiting for people in bars or restaurants), do I want to lug around a thick hardcover tome or a small, mass market paperback? Particularly when traveling by train or plane, luggage space is at a premium, so the smaller the book, the better. I'm not alone in this; people I've come across who favored the e-book did so for the exact same reason.
However, this works against the dedicated e-book reader, like the Sony Reader. What I liked about the PDA approach to e-book reading was that it was a device I was carrying around with me already--including as it did phone numbers, appointments, and other data I needed.
What I'm waiting for is a PDA-like device that can leverage e-paper/flexible displays to provide a true multifunction device-cellphone, PDA, iPod, e-book reader, e-magazine reader--basically a complete media center in one device. Once electronic documents become as easy to read as paper documents (like the E Ink/Sony approach to e-paper), I'm there. And this doesn't mean that I'm going to abandon print books--after all, despite readability, electronic devices are still often pretty annoying.
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