The Kindle – This book will change your life
By
That’s not our, headline, by the way, but a headline in today’s Independent under which, Michael Bywater gives his verdict on Amazon’s dedicated eBook reader.
Like most eBook afficionados in Not-America, I’m looking forward to seeing this device, but in the meantime I’ve ordered a couple of other eBook devices to quench my literary thirst – I’ll post information about those once I’ve received them, and had a chance to play around with them.
What is clear from the Independent article, and from the news that Google is going to implement a system to enable publishers to sell ebooks direct to consumers through Google, is that 2009 is shaping up to be the year that the electronic book goes mainstream.
There are dozens of suitable devices on the market at the moment (most of which, admittedly are import-only if you live in the UK). Will one manufacturer dominate? Which format will emerge triumphant? And what’s the future for DRM?
Keep checking back – we’re going to ask some other people in the know, while we watch this particular section of the industry with great interest…
7 Comments
June 2nd, 2009 at 10:57 am
Still not convinced by the ebook, I’ve got to say. There are various advantages to them, but in practice they’re not that great and certainly not anywhere near the kind of advantages that an iPod offers over a traditional record collection, because we just don’t use books in the same way we do music. I think the audiobook (and, with that, the increasing convenience of the audiobook) is bigger news, frankly – audiobooks do the work for us, which is the kind of advantage new technologies really need to offer if they’re to replace old ones. I don’t see a comparable benefit with ebooks.
June 2nd, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Portability and accessiblity are the same for words as for music. You’re going on holiday, how many books do you pack? Or you commute every day and are about to finish book two in the trilogy, but book three is only out in hardback and who wants to lug that onto the bus? Or, let’s say you could download the ‘Top 100 sci-fi Stories’, or ‘Matt Keefe Recommends the Ten Best Historical Epics’ or whatever. Also think of other benefits that come from digital files, such as the ability to search for a particular passage, for review or to check on something you’d forgotten?
Not that I have any interest in getting an e-book for myself until prices and formats (and capabilities) have become a lot more stable…
June 2nd, 2009 at 3:52 pm
…don’t agree with you Matt. Storing books for many purposes including reference (city guides etc) makes them so much more portable with the right device. Agree that seperate eBook readers dont make sense but my latest novel on my Blackberry is so easy for my bus home. I love the physical feel of a book at home but out and about there is no competition. Still horses for courses as they say.
June 2nd, 2009 at 3:54 pm
I don’t know if I can be bothered with an eReader that’s not the kindle, for the same reason I’ve bought iPods rather than other media players. You know you’ll open up a world of hurt buying books and then getting them onto the reader. Once the kindle becomes available, you know you can get compatible books from the amazon website.
I _am_ keen to try one out, though.
June 2nd, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Books generally don’t get nicked. Expensive high-tech gadgets definitely do. I won’t be abandoning my battered Rough Guides just yet.
On a *slightly* more positive note, I look forward to Google vs Amazon. Google seem to be embracing open-source (see the demo for Google Wave), and this can only give them an edge over Amazon’s horribly restrictive devices – having your expensive gadget shackled to one service provider smells too much like a mobile phone contract.
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:16 pm
[...] This post was Twitted by nextread – Real-url.org [...]
June 5th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
I’ve no doubt there are instances when ebooks have advantages over books (Gav and Simon both cite good examples) but these remain exceptions and the advantages are neither universal nor really that substantial in most cases. With music, they were. MP3 players added a huge number of benefits – playlists, listening to whole collections of thousands of songs on random, rating favourites, grouping songs by dozens of different filters and so on. There are not the same additional advantages for ebooks over books.
In fact, I think a lot of the instances where an ebook reader might be most useful – as Simon rightly points out, with guidebooks for example – happen to be instances where books were lacking in the first place and some other form of device was always going to be preferrable: I think we’ll see those kinds of reference sources going online more and more anyway (a Wikipedia equivalent for the Rough Guides, anyone?) which sort of bypasses the argument. We’ll all have phones and tiny little laptops (I’m writing this on one the size of a book, as it happens) to look them up on anyway, especially as wireless becomes more and more universal.
I’ve nothing against ebooks; what I’m reporting is complete indifference – I’ve no real interest in buying an ebook reader and I remain to be convinced that there are loads of people who will. Maybe it will become a perfectly successful, moderately niche market for those who are as interested in keeping up-to-date with technology as much as they are in reading books.
Those people aside, there remains the question of whether most people will want to read ebooks or whether they’re particularly to attached to the old-fashioned physical versions. You got a few folks who protested about the loss of their beloved vinyl in the move to digital music, but they were very definitely in the minority; with books, I do wonder if we might find the tendency towards the tangible and traditional is both greater and more widespread – I’ve certainly heard a lot more people expressing that view than I ever did in regards to music. It could be that our relationship to a medium we approach with the senses of sight and touch is inherently a more physical one. With music, as much as people might have loved big, black, shiny records, the relationship was never really that tactile anyway; as long as it reaches our ears, we’re happy.
I think quite possibly the jump from book to audiobook may be an easier one for most people to make than the jump from book to ebook and, I say again, I do think it’s entirely possible that ultimately technology’s real impact on the book world will be the widespread popularisation of the audiobook, not the ebook. That wouldn’t be a bad thing, either.