Archive for September 11th, 2007

Here we go again.  In the past week we got news about Amazon’s Kindle, Cybook is due anytime now, and a brief peak at the new Sony reader.  Everyone is excited; hopes are high that the e-book is finally coming into its own.  In my opinion we could have ten devices coming out and it still doesn’t change the things that need to be changed.  That’s the prolific proprietary formats, along with availability and price of content.  There are just too many formats and I believe that it is a barrier to new adopters.   The average person picking up a Sony reader doesn’t know this.  Most people don’t know about Project Gutenberg. That’s why Sony can act like they are giving customers a gift buy offering 100 classics for free. It’s not until they get it home and set up that they realize that they are locked into Sony for content and locked out of other sites that sell e-books.  Then they question, “Which format works with what device and why isn’t content available for all devices?”   Format confusion and the fact that you can’t get your books from where you please, are a turn off.  Unless they happen to stumble across user forums to overcome this, the device just may sit on a shelf or find its way to EBay.  Another barrier is pricing.  If a person buys a book for $20, after reading it, he or she could choose to sell it, share it with a friend.  E-books can’t do that, so why must we pay the same price as a hardback?  This must change.  In order for technology acceptance to take place, there has to be perceived usefulness.  There has to be some incentive for the customer to move to digital reading.  After all they just paid the average of $300 for the device and now pay the same price for an e-book as a paper book. Lastly, availability of e-books needs to increase.  I would love to buy older books that are no longer in print as well as new books on release date in e-book format.  When I think back to my first device, it got little use simply because I couldn’t find anything that I wanted to read.  If I didn’t know better, I would think that e-book device makers are setting up their wares for failure.