{"id":298,"date":"2007-04-23T05:56:00","date_gmt":"2007-04-23T12:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/?p=298"},"modified":"2007-07-29T12:56:36","modified_gmt":"2007-07-29T19:56:36","slug":"e-books-not-a-threat-to-real-books-any-time-soon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/?p=298","title":{"rendered":"e-books: not a threat to real books any time soon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Am I in the minority here? Most people I talk to seem to think that e-Books are great and ordinary books are going to go the way of the dodo in the next 5 years&#8230; e-Book readers do seem to be getting better and better, but here&#8217;s why real books are going to be around for the foreseeable future: they just don&#8217;t offer <em>enough<\/em> over real books to justify the price. And if technology history tells us anything, it&#8217;s that technically better products don&#8217;t always win in the marketplace. VHS won over Betamax. MP3 continues to win over pretty much every other music format. And e-Books don&#8217;t have much hope of winning against real books any time soon.<\/p>\n<p>The advantages of real books over e-Books:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Battery life.<\/li>\n<li>Display contrast and viewing angle.<\/li>\n<li>Price. It&#8217;s around $300 for the reader, plus the cost of the e-Books themselves.<\/li>\n<li>Open format.<\/li>\n<li>Availability.<\/li>\n<li>Flexibility of page format and non-text display.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The advantages of e-Books over real books:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Portability. Kinda. 80 books in the space of one book, but you better look after that one!<\/li>\n<li>Ease of publishing.<\/li>\n<li>Search facilities.<\/li>\n<li>Built-in lighting.<\/li>\n<li>Ability to do other things besides read books.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So what do e-Books offer over real books? Portability &#8211; but when do I need to carry more than one or two books around? Search facilities &#8211; almost no use to a typical reader of novels or popular non-fiction. Built in lighting may be handy for bedtime reading and not waking up the SO. But it&#8217;s a small plus weighed against the significant minuses listed above.<\/p>\n<p>Ability to play music or do other things? Well I&#8217;m all for convergence, and this could be useful to some, but the fact is that most multi-function devices are jack-of-all-trades, master of none. Nokia may be the world&#8217;s largest maker of digital cameras, but nobody (let alone photographers) uses their cameraphone for actually taking pictures they intend to keep. Or take the PSP &#8211; games, music, and film. It might have had a chance if it was just a games machine (although the DS beats it handily). But it&#8217;s a poor music and film device compared to oh, say the iPod and a 40&#8243; TV.<\/p>\n<p>e-Books also suffer from the lack of a decent target market. College students would be a good market if textbooks were available in e-Book format and if students had any money. But the intersection of gadget fans and book fans is not that big. What we need are e-Book package deals: reader plus some collected works of e.g. Isaac Asimov, Terry Pratchett, Stroustrup\/Knuth\/Meyers, for example. That might actually enlarge the early adopter market and break the chicken-and-egg problem of availability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Am I in the minority here? Most people I talk to seem to think that e-Books are great and ordinary books are going to go the way of the dodo in the next 5 years&#8230; e-Book readers do seem to be getting better and better, but here&#8217;s why real books&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}