Sony is trying to do for e-books what Apple has done for downloadable digital music.But what was truly bizarre was this:
It has launched a handheld device designed for electronic books- dubbed the Sony Reader - at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
It has a screen made from electronic paper that makes text look almost as sharp as it is on a printed page.
Sony has realised the importance of making sure there is good content for a gadget like this.While I applaud the publishers for this move, it really astonishes me. Why would they do this? Books are basically the last form of media that isn't easily converted to digital information. Newspapers and magazines are all on the web now, and music and television, well, bittorrent anyone?
It has done deals with major publishers, including Random House, Penguin and HarperCollins, to sell digital e-books via its Connect online store.
Part of the reason that books have withstood (more or less) the digital onslaught is the inherent difficulty of converting the info. Sure, when "Half-blood prince" came out hackers all over the world put together a pirate version by literally retyping it in to their computers. But that's not an option for any but the smallest number of books.
So why would the publishers agree to this? If it really takes off, they'll be slitting their own throats. The article makes the comparison between the proposed Sony bookstore and iTunes, but ignores the corrolary: most tracks released on iTunes make it to pirate nets and P2P within minutes, not hours or days.
Oh, and I don't believe for a moment Sony will pull this off. They're simply too locked in to an old model of business. Now, Google on the other hand...
5 comments:
I think that they are secure in the knowledge that the experience of reading a book onscreen is always going to be inferior to reading a book on paper. My eyes just hate me after a marathon blogging session. They see e-books (probably correctly) as a small secondary market that has limited growth potential but very fat margins (because they don't have to deal with the physical making, distribution and merchandising of the books).
Not only does reading onscreen suck, but books have permanence.
I have books on my shelves that my grandmother bought when she was a child. I can read a book that's 150 years old without needing any technology (other than a dust mask).
Music has never been recorded in any medium with that kind of permanence. I don't mind buying CDs, therefore, knowing that they'll be obsolete and unreadable before I die.
But I will never buy an ebook, because I don't plan to pay for it again twenty years later, when I want to reread it.
It's true that digitizing a book once it is printed isn't SUPER easy, but it's really not that hard at a commercial level with the automated (robotic page-turning) scanners they have nowadays.
And it's a non-issue for new books. Sure, pirates made copies of "The Half-Blood Prince" by methodically re-typing it, but the publisher doesn't have to do that. They already HAVE a digital version of the text. In fact, I'd venture to say that the very first completed copy of the The HBP WAS a digital version. Today, publisher's START with digital, and use THAT to create the physical. There's no need to go back and "re-create" a seperate e-version when it already exists.
I'm not so sure that the "experience" is guaranteed to be better with paper. Or rather, I'm not sure that'll deter people. People listen to MP3s despite the fact that they're a technically inferior format to CDs, which themselves are inferior to LPs from the perspective of sound quality.
(No, I'm not some LP fetishist, but it is true.)
People may choose ebooks, in the same manner they chose MP3s and CDs, because they're more convenient and easier to lug around.
The "permanence" problem is true enough, though I'd wager not for as long as you think.
And besides, I was talking about piracy, which means you wouldn't have to pay again! (smirk)
Speaking of piracy, the point isn't that ebooks are hard for the publishers to produce, but that they're hard for pirates to produce. Making ebooks more widely available from the publishers will make it easy for the pirates to get at them.
Let me also mention for people dealing with authoritarian governments, that throwing an e-book into a bonfire is probably not as satifying as burning a book that is made out of real paper.
[A handy tidbit for those anticipating a Conservative election win.]
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