‘Students wary of e-books,’ says Northeastern U. student newspaper
“Electronic book devices have been available to the public for years, but improved versions, like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader Digital Book, remain unpopular among Northeastern students and faculty.” - Northeastern News, a student newspaper at NU in Boston.
Big reasons given for anti-e-book sentiments at NU: “English professor Gary Goshgarian said e-books are merely a gimmick and hopes they will not replace 
paper books,” reports the paper’s Lucia Allen. “‘I’m an old-fashioned kind of person, so perhaps it’s a generational thing,’ he said. ‘I would not be interested in paying $400 to hold an electronic memory of books.’” And even some students quoted are echoing his anti-E sentiments despite NU’s obvious pride in high tech on campus (photo). People want the look and feel of P.
Combine that with the horrors of using DRMed books—something not even explored in the NU article—and you can see that the e-book industry has a rather tough row ahead if it stubbornly insists on not experimenting with social DRM and other alternatives to the consumer-hostile “protection” that big publishers now favor.
I know E will catch on sooner or later and, among other things, boost international sales and cater to screen-oriented people who are open minded. But meanwhile, if the IDPF and members care about business from the NU students, they might check out Dear Santa: Please make Harlequin FEEL customers’ pain, try ‘Social DRM,’ and push harder for e-book standards. Harlequin, a terrific company in many ways, is just one example of traditional DRM’s role as a sales toxin, of course.
The piracy issue: One way to avoid or reduce reliance on DRM, which students hate, is to bundle textbook costs in with others—reducing the incentive for piracy. Combine that with social DRM, rather than the traditional kind, and the e-textbook experience for students would be much nicer.
An irony: If memory serves, the founder of Textbook Revolution is or was a Northeastern University student. TR, by the way, avoids DRM.
The obvious question: While e-books have many negatives right now, beyond the awesome positives, I’m surprised that the NU article was as vehemently anti-e-book as it was. The story includes a reference to the $33 million in e-book sales reported by IDPF for 2007, a sharp increase over ‘06, but then goes on to say that “this growth may not be enough to save e-books. By 2003, a number of big name sellers in the literary industry—like Barnes and Noble–had stopped selling e-books because of dismal sales and Gemstar stopped selling its Softbook e-book devices and e-book content that same year.” Cheery news to start your day, huh? But we can at least wonder if Lucia Allen really contacted a representative bunch of people for comment. Are English professors, notorious as Luddites, the best people to offer the final word on e-reading? That said, the lit types are an important part of the potential market for E, and I hope that industry decision-makers will understand the great damage they are doing by giving nontechnical people the extra hoops to jump through, in the form of DRM and eBabel.
And finally a well-deserved dig against that NU paper: The damn link stopped working after I’d accessed the Allen article a few times. The paper wanted me to register, apparently, for continued access. Thanks, folks, but I have enough spam sells cluttering my mailbox.
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