By now you may have had a chance to try out an
Electronic Book or Book Reader Software on a Handheld Device like the
Compaq Ipaq. For several
years, we’ve been trying out a variety of these small devices and
trying to develop an opinion as to why an eBook market hasn’t really
happened yet.
In case you haven’t much thought about eBooks,
here’s the basic premise.
·
We print books onto pieces of paper, binding them, and
then creating a distribution process to ship, store, and market them
(which always ends in unsold books being returned to publishers and
then being re-inventoried, reshipped, and hopefully sold at huge
discounts).
·
This process is expensive, time consuming, and
old-fashioned.
·
Many worthwhile books can’t be published because the
audience for them is too small (or too unpredictable).
Academic books, for instance, often have an audience of only a
hundred copies or fewer. This
market can be serviced by using digital printing techniques to Print
On Demand (Xerox is a big player in this market), but eBooks could let
such books be distributed even more quickly and at minimum cost.
·
Children’s (and college students) back packs bulge
with schoolbooks that get carried about and then are discarded, sold,
or passed on to the next generation of less than willing haulers. They’re so heavy that pediatricians are recommending that
our children use the back-pack equivalent of a roller suitcase to
avoid injuries.
·
Books get used up – just what do you do with copies of
books about DOS operating systems, WordStar, or -286 boards?
Or with all those murder mysteries you buy in airports to read
on planes?
The eBook would be a tidy solution to such
problems. The idea sounds
simple. Create an
easy-to-hold little computer with a long-life battery and a
pleasant-to-read screen. Let readers easily load them up with their choice of literary
selections, read them, and replace them.
That’s the idea. The
reality is something else.
(1)
The readers are not all that pleasant to hold, have batteries
that often wouldn’t last for a long plane trip, and are certainly
not yet a very pleasant way to read.
We keep making that better with smaller, lighter devices,
longer-life batteries, and better screen resolution, but it still
isn’t as pleasant as reading a nicely printed book.
Some readers feel that the experience of reading
a book is simply a different experience and no one will ever be
willing to give up this aesthetic pleasure.
We should wonder why our children don’t demand Saturday
morning radio programs instead of color TV and DVD’s.
Expectations change with experience.
(2)
This isn’t cheap – or even a good value replacement for
buying books. Readers
typically cost $200 to 400. Books
(with the exception of some texts in the public domain) usually sell
for 75 to 80% of the list price of a hardback book (the real price of
that book in most chain bookstores and on the web).
But in the real world, people buy books, read them, and then
share them with family and friends, before sending them off to the
library or a hospital for a generous tax write-off.
Here, that book is for you (or at least for your reader) and
sharing isn’t in the plan. Publishers
who are reluctant to understand the world is changing are the barrier
here (just as in the music industry).
(3)
Variety isn’t that easy to achieve either.
Publishers have been slow to commit to the new medium.
That means only a small fraction of the books in print are
available as eBooks. Again,
this gets better over time. But a Book Reader is only a great solution
if it replaces my pile of books – not if it replaces some of it.
(4)
If you’re interested in reading your own business documents
without carrying around a briefcase full of paper, eBooks can actually
work quite well. eBook
software can package up documents, charts, and other materials and
make them into personal books for easy reading.
In that case, the reader may still be relatively expensive, but
justified for its business purpose, and the content (since it’s
yours already) is free.
The best place to see where this may all be
headed is not fact, but rather fiction.
Cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson’s book ** The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated
Primer** is a tale in which a prominent role is played by a small,
very portable book (in this case, based on nanotechnology) from which
a young lady (several young ladies in this story) can access all the
world’s knowledge as well as the ability to weave fanciful tales
around their own reality.
Perhaps Mr. Stephenson had some of the other new technologies we’ve
been looking at in mind. We
mean, of course, Xerox/Gyricon’s electronic paper and E Ink’s
electronic ink technology.
Gyricon, a Xerox PARC spin-off, has created a technology which permits
signs (characters and images) to be created by displaying
electronically charged balls which are half white and half black. Just as electronic signals to a computer display’s pixels
cause an image to appear or change, signals to a Gyricon display cause
its text to change. The
major first application is store signage and Gyricon is receiving a
great deal of attention in the retail sign market, with a first trial
scheduled for this summer in Macy’s at a north New Jersey location.
E Ink, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based firm, is a spin-off of an MIT
project. It uses
oil-filled capsules in which particles of titanium
dioxide are suspended. A
charge to selected particles (which are white) create the image.
E Ink started out, too, in the signage business, but with
investments from Phillips and NEC is now more focused on display
technology which is expected to reach the market in the 2003
timeframe.
Although the initial technology will first reach the display market in
two-color (presumably black on white), glass displays, both have the
ability to achieve full color and flexibility.
(In fact, an early demonstration by E Ink and Lucent showed a
flexible display based on E Ink technology and Lucent’s plastic
transistors (which can be printed onto a sheet of plastic or paper).
Both technologies have the possibility of providing the basis for very
lightweight, flexible, low-power displays.
Put it all together and you spell not mother, but rather the very real
possibility that by 2003-2005 someone could build a handheld device
that could be lightweight, easy-to-read, and not very expensive –
and, by the way, it could wirelessly access news, entertainment,
references and education and the latest novel.
At a recent conference on eBook technology, one speaker
predicted that the New York Times – on paper – wouldn’t exist by
2018, thanks to this technology.
We want that device and we are confident that as enabling technologies,
infrastructure (wireless) and business models converge, we – and you
– will get it.
In the meantime, you might like to participate in a self-test for our
readers, designed for your own enlightenment (but feel free to tell us
what you think). If we
get enough feedback, we’ll print the results.
·
Have you ever used an eBook?
o
Did
you like it?
o
What
for (business, school, pleasure)?
·
At what price point for book readers do you think this is a market?
REFERENCES
You can find Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age
at Amazon.com.
Here’s a list of some of the devices and where
to find them:
Specialty eBook devices
(note that a number of these companies have been bought up by larger
players and their products combined.
So NuovoMedia and SoftBook, for example, two early players, are
the underlying technology of the GemStar eBook produced by RCA:
GemStar eBook (RCA) http://www.rca.com/product/viewdetail/0,1322,PI45798,00.html
Franklin eBookman http://www.franklin.com/ebookman/default.asp
General purpose
handhelds/PDA’s which can be used with various types of Book Reader
software:
Palm and Handspring both use Book Reader software for the Palm
OS
http://www.palm.com/products/
http://www.handspring.com/products/visor/index.jhtm
Casio, Compaq and
Hewlett Packard can all run Book Reader software on their handheld
computers.
http://www.casio.com/personalpcs/product.cfm?section=
19&product=3553 http://www5.compaq.com/products/handhelds/pocketpc/index.html
http://www.hp.com/jornada/products/540/index.html
If you’re looking for eBooks to download, try:
http://www.ebooks.com/
where they will sell you your choice of several hundred books on a
variety of subjects, but they will also let you have just the chapters
of the book(s) you want, at a lesser cost.
http://www.free-ebooks.net/
is good place to find
free e-books, mainly for downloading to your PC rather than an e-book
reader. It’s also full
of information on how to publish and market e-books.
http://ebooks.barnesandnoble.com/
is the mainstream place to find what the big publishers are offering
in e-books. There are
also free readers for downloading.
Information on ePaper and eInk:
A great review article on the subject in MIT’s
Technology Review http://www.technologyreview.com/magazine/mar01/mann.asp
Gyricon at http://www.gyriconmedia.com/
E Ink at http://www.eink.com/
