Not A Blog™

If it weren’t for other people trying to invent fashionable new ways of doing old things, and my subsequent mocking of these things, I wouldn’t have any fun at all. Today on the block of chopping: Amazon and their plans to reinvolutiate the eBook reader. Because regular books are so old and boring, of course.

An eBook reader, for those of you who were living under a series of rocks the past few years, is sort of like an iPod for books. Or it’s like a book for geeks. Or it’s like book with electronics. Or something.

And therein lies the problem with the eBook concept in general: it tries to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist. Books aren’t all that inefficient. If you shrunk them down any more, you wouldn’t be able to read them, and the reader has these same size limitations. Most people aren’t such voracious readers that they finish an entire pile of books while traveling—and even if they do, there are multiple bookstores in every airport and every city. It’s not like books are hard to find. Sure, the reader offers some convenience over books in certain areas, but it doesn’t really make the experience of reading any easier. In essence, there’s not anything wrong with books that an electronic reader fixes.

There was an article in Newsweek recently, about that Amazon dot-com company and their attempt to “reinvent” the eBook reader. (Someone else already invented it the first time, you see.) The article talked about the Future of Reading and Writing, but for the most part, the article was a PR piece for Amazon’s new gadget, the Kindle—available now, you’ll be not surprised to learn.

The Kindle is much like Sony’s reader in that it uses e-Ink technology (reflecting light rather than projecting it like a computer screen); it is the size and weight of a regular book; and it costs more than an entire shelf of books. The idea is that you download your tomes onto this little device, and use it in lieu of an actual book. It can hold thousands of books, and the Kindle has an additional feature where it connects to a proprietary network where you can buy more books.

Once you get past the swooning superlatives, you have a hunk of plastic that shows book leaves, and allows you to buy more books. And that’s pretty much it.

Problem number one with the Kindle is a direct quote right from the inventor: “This isn’t a device, it’s a service.”

No no no no no NO! That’s exactly the opposite reason people buy books. Yes, the book will probably be disassociated from its substrate, the way music and film has been—but in none of these examples does the subscriber model work. You can get people to subscribe—and at the same time they will be copying (stealing) every bit of whatever you send them. To force a subscription model with what amounts to more stupid DRM on the owners of your eBook is to make the same mistake that the music and film distributors have made over the past ten years—and continue to make. How can you possibly start out on the wrong foot like this? Insert Head Slap of Stupidity here.

With the Kindle, no more shall one buy books; no, now you buy a service which has a book-like formatting! There is all kinds of talk about how the book might persist for a certain period of time, or that the author can append changes to a “finished” book, or a fiction novelist could rewrite an ending. (Heck, why stop there? What about an infinitely expanding Choose Your Own Adventure?) One can subscribe to newspapers, where issues will expire and no longer be available to you after so many days.

Aside from directly contradicting all their other ideas of having more access to more information, this is insulting. My books don’t expire. I have copies of National Geographic from 1969. But when you subscribe to a service, you don’t get these things. Like Major League Baseball subscribers found out just a few weeks ago, you get screwed.

Which brings me to the second problem: Price. I’m not even talking about the price of early adoption here. At $400, yes, I think the reader itself is overpriced, but that’s really just the cost of having it before everyone else. I expect the readers will come down in price. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Amazon take a cue from the telecom industry, where they take a loss on the readers and make profit on the books (or “service”). In a sense, the Kindle is like a cell phone for books, since you use some proprietary network to connect to the store. Of course, if they try to go this route, they will fail miserably.

Although the initial cost of the eBook is high, this would be justified in the face of extreme savings on the actual substance of the book. Fortunately for Amazon, Amazon has no intention of allowing this to happen. A new book is still $9.99. Considering that what you’re physically getting is a bunch of arranged electrons, this is almost as ridiculous as paying $30 for a new hardback. There was no pricing given for older work, but the article makes mention of how publishers are balking at the lower prices customers feel they are justified. (Just because they’re not buying the substrate and paying for shipping, and printing, and binding, and all that other stuff! The nerve!) Anyway, like all IP middlemen, publishers would prefer to charge the same for less, so the savings on an individual eBook, while present, aren’t really going to be all that significant. Not to mention they plan to charge for public domain works, as well. For an electronic version of something in the public domain, there is no reasonable excuse for this. It is pure greed.

As if this weren’t bad enough, the article mentions the price of 99 cents or $1.99 to subscribe to blogs. This is so misguided as to be laughable. First of all, which blogs? Well, the ones Amazon deems worthy of inclusion, which rather defeats the point of the blog in the first place, doesn’t it? Then there’s subscribing to newspapers—newspapers which one can, of course, already read online. Blogs and newspapers can both be read online for the low, low price of nothing—which makes one wonder why you would subscribe to these at all. Why not just go straight on the internet?

Third, there’s the matter of which type of reading you’re actually doing online. One of the arguments made is that we read on computer screens all the time anyway, so this is just another step in that digitization. True, I think it will be mostly digital eventually, but it will take a full generation to make that shift, if it happens at all.

Currently, the sort of reading which is done online is “short form” reading: news articles, blogs, snippets of this and that. Sometimes as little as individual headlines. Books are “long form” reading. You sit down with a book and read. No one sits down with a computer and reads like that. I’ve tried reading books online. By the third page, I’m off to check my email or responding to an IM, or pulling up the weather. The internet is not conducive to concentration.

The internet (or more generally, digital) has another problem, too. The text online isn’t static. It scoots around the screen, obscured by pop-up ads and colored by context-sensitive plug-ins. It disappears with barely a twitch of your finger, and snaps back up (in a different sized window, perhaps) just as quickly. If the power goes out, it becomes completely inaccessible.

The article said that Amazon has no intention of inserting ads into any of their media—yet. Fair enough, but what happens when they do? Because they will. Books—regular, dry, old grandpa books do not have this problem. They persist. Electronic books are going to have a hard time overcoming the stipulation that they are not the flashy, annoying, impossible to read because IT WON’T STOP BLINKING internet. They probably won’t start out this way, but if they develop anything like Amazon’s model, they will end up that way, and a significant portion of the population—including me—will go back to their bland, non-internet-esque books.

There are other problems that I don’t have time to get into right now, such as what happens when the reader breaks. Books don’t break. They fall apart, but even a pile of pages held together with rubber bands is still legible. Also there’s the fact that the reader itself looks butt ugly.

I’d like to make a prediction as to the kind of reader that would do well in the market, if anyone bothers to make it. The successful eBook reader will not subscribe to anything; won’t be tied in to one retailer; and won’t screw you with gimmicky extra crap; and won’t be arbitrarily limited by DRM or whatever tomorrow’s equivalent is. The difficulty with such a device is that book publishers aren’t dumb. They saw what happened to music and film, and by dang they’re not going to let it happen to them.

How many eBooks have you seen recently? Probably few. There’s certainly no technical reason books can’t be released simultaneously with their e-counterparts. Manuscripts are all already written on the computer. They certainly take up much less data for much more information than music or movies. The reason they’re not very prevalent is because book publishers don’t want to license eBooks due to piracy. Electronic books are pirated like everything else. The best thing to do is not make them electronic in the first place. Hence, no electronic books, and without those, the reader becomes moot.

I expect this cycle will eventually crumble, but it won’t happen because the reader is new and shiny—and it’s definitely not going to happen as a result of some subscription based service. The electronic book isn’t just a digital extension of regular books. It’s something else entirely, and if you try to market it based on this, it’s not going to fly.

-Ted