TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Must be a great job to be a futurist.

Until Apple showed it could make a fortune selling it, everyone thought digital music would have to be free. And then there were those who asked what idiot would pay twenty or a hundred dollars a month to get more TV when they can get over-the-air for Free. And paying a thousand bucks for a dedicated TV-watching device?? Really.

I really think the analogy is a good one. The analogy also applies to dedicated eBook readers. Some day, we’ll all have multifunction devices. Display technology will be in our sunglasses or projected directly onto our optic nerves so we won’t have to worry about whether we can actually read on that tiny screen. But for now, a dedicated device offers a lot of value to a subset of the population–especially those of us who no longer feel comfortable with the tiny print you find in mass market paperbacks.

Sure, play with ad-supported eBooks. But lots of people prefer their TV without ads. Why should books be different?

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com

I agree with Rob. I don’t like someone trying to sell me something all the time. My favorite TV channel on satellite is TCM, which has no commercials at all. Also, I use my TiVo to skip commercials all the time.

I feel the same way about ebooks. I would much rather pay a fair price for an ebook than get it for free and put up with advertising. Some people like (or at least tolerate) advertising, especially if they think they can get something for “free”. Well, it isn’t really free, is it? It’s just subsidized.

R. and J: Heck, I’d hope the for-sale model would survive! In fact, I want ad-supported books to have a turn-the-ads-off option for paying folks. I just want to see more options for readers, and besides, the ad-supported books may give ‘em a taste for the other kind. As a writer, I can go for that!

Thanks and HH,
David

Well, for now at least, Wowio books don’t have that many ads. What’s more, with the right arrangement, you can simply have ads between chapters. They needn’t and shouldn’t be continuous distractions. Tacky! As for animations, fergit! I’m with you there!!!!!! David

My scepticism of futurology need no extra support, but unbidden more is supplied.

I do not buy the idea, there is no economics in the thing, nothing but wishful nativity. Just how many books does are likely to be produced, and how many authors producing them? Any one’s guess, but a hell of a lot is my guess, a lot more than advertisers are willing to pay for, by a large margin.

I will also suggest one more dimension. Some books do not make a lot of money initially, but their quality means they are bought year after year for decades on end — that is a lot longer than most companies paying for advertising will be around. Other specialist books, never will have wide audience and need to charge a heavier price if the author is to keep writing — just how would advertisers cope with that? Can any one believe that they would subsidise some work of history because it is a work of quality and critical to the development of knowledge, or argue that such an author should receive only pennies for their efforts?

Publishing is far too wide and diverse to be financed by penny-anny operations like advertising. It may have a role, but a very small one, just as it once did in book publishing, subsidising publication here and there, now mostly forgotten. Digital publishing’s future is for even more works, even more diverse than before, and a wider and diverse international audience than anything managed before in human history, just what division of the GDP, or for that matter the GIP, gross international product, would advertising have to control to support digital publishing now and in the future? And why would ebooks deserve a significant part of that figure?

Will the peddlers of electric toothbrushes and underwear determine what is published? Should we found the development of our knowledge and culture on the intellectual giants that inhabit the world of advertising? Would anyone think that a good idea, even if it were viable, which it is not?

Using the same logic of such “futurism” should not everything be free if in anyway it can carry advertising? What makes ebooks so different? What would make such an economy work?

Authors deserve payment, they deserve a market capable of paying them, and no reader, who loves reading, wants to deny them their due. Our problem is purely a technical one, a price regime that recognises that digital publishing means virtually free reproduction (practically all the costs are in the writing and producing), and means of payment which is less awkward, and far less expensive to pay small amounts and that these payments do not pass through too many hands (none would be excellent) before reaching the creative minds responsible for them.

I bought my Sony Reader last March. I have found out that most of the people do not even know that there is a such thing as an E-book reader. Or they are stuck with the turning of pages.

I have in a Doctor’s office and spent about 10 minutes showing him how it works. He loved it.

People have stopped at our table in restaurants to see what we are reading and how.

People who read loved the idea of taking multiple readings on a trip instead of carrying multiple paperbacks or hardbacks. Some are reaching the age of the print being too small in print and the way you can enlarge on the reader.

I remember my first mobile phone from the early Eighty’s. I bought it in the TV department of Sears. The size of that of a lunch box with an antenna that you hooked outside of the car. Big and bulky. Now look at mobile phones and how everybody and their brother has one.

Maybe you think that E-books are only going to take off if they are free but I think the future customers have to know that they are out there and how convenient they are. They need to see the readers and see how they work in person. Give people more credit, once they actually see more around they will sell. After the theory has been around since Star Trek.