Yesterday, Barnes and Noble released their new e-book reader called the nook, billing it as “the world’s most advanced e-book reader”. I don’t think “nook” is a very catchy name, in spite of rhyming with book… but that’s another story.
I’ve made no secret in the past about my dislike, even distrust, of eBook readers. Especially the Kindle, which I vow to never own after their 1984 debacle.
As I’ve discussed the subject with friends and colleagues, my opinion has refined quite a bit, and my basic points come down to:
- The price of a book reflected heavy publishing costs, including equipment, materials, labor, and distribution… none of which apply to eBooks, making them rather expensive in comparison.
- Real books can be shared with friends, given away, or re-sold, but while the format of data makes doing this even easier, the licensing applied to eBooks prohibits doing so.
- Real books don’t stop working when a battery dies.
- Dropping a book in a puddle, losing it while on the bus, are misfortunes that only cost a few dollars to correct, a far smaller amount than the cost of even the cheapest ebook reader.
- Dropping a book on the floor, or accidentally sitting on it does nothing to reduce your ability to read it later… and in fact, people often use books to hold things up, to sit on, to stand on, etc.
- None of the books I would most desire to replace are available as ebooks. I enjoy turning the pages of a novel, but I’d love to be able to carry around dozens or hundreds of reference books without breaking my back.
- By that same measure, most students would also love to stop breaking their backs with textbooks, but no ebook reader yet has solved the problems of universal page numbers or of jotting notes in the margins.
- And finally, they take away all those expected advantages of real books without giving any significant new adantages in return.
While the Nook offers many advantages over the Kindle, including built-in WiFi, direct loading and reading of PDFs, replacable batteries, and synchronized annotations, it only overcomes one of my stated hurdles, and only to a limited extent. Nook allows you “loan to a friend”, but it does not allow you to “give” to a friend. Nor does it allow you to re-sell to anyone.
As far as I can tell, all Barnes and Noble did was add a touch-sensitive LCD screen to the bottom of a Kindle, and add a half-baked book loaning mechanism. That may be enough to lure in people who want a Kindle but were scared off by the 1984 debacle… but I don’t believe it’s going to be enough to coax any book converts.
So what would it take to convert me — and lots of others like me — to ebooks? Pressure publishers to make searchable ebook versions of reference materials.
Working 9-to-5 in information technology, I have acquired a large library of reference books on programming languages, APIs, systems, data formats, and so on. If I could carry all of those (dozens of books) to work with me on a small device, I’d jump on the opportunity, but none of those materials are available in ebook format.
And when I’m not at work, my two most time-consuming activities are photography and language study. Admittedly, it will be a long time before photographic quality is available on ebook readers, but current readers are already capable of displaying language lessons… and most even support MP3 playback for the accompanying audio materials. I have an entire bookshelf at home dedicated to beginner, intermediate, and advanced books and CDs for Spanish, Russian, Italian, German, French, Ukrainian, and Portuguese, which I would happily trade for even a mostly disfunctional e-reader if I could, but unfortunately, those materials are simply not available in any other format at present.
For companies with the leverage of Amazon and Barnes and Noble, it should be a no-brainer to lean on those publishers. Today, all books are written in an electronic format to begin with. Why should it be so hard to simply run that original through some converter and do a little bit of editing, and produce the single most useful argument for a higher-profit, lower-overhead version of their product?