What’s the Matter with Ebooks?

http://www.dancohen.org/2015/03/24/whats-the-matter-with-ebooks/

by lermontov • 11 years ago

37 52 11 years ago

marssaxman• 11 years ago

That they come pre-pwned, mostly. I don't really trust digital media.

transfire• 11 years ago

Being a "I can't wait for" enthusiast of eBooks before they existed, when they finally arrived I must sadly report they "aren't ready yet". There are two major issues that prevent eBooks from supplanting paper books.

1. The design of devices on which to read eBooks are far too bulky, non-ergonomic and expensive. Until 13" tablets are ultra-light weight, malleable, full color, and have extra long battery life, at a reasonable price, the medium will play second-fiddle to the comfort of a real book.

2. eBook ownership is confusing and tied to particular companies which exert authoritative control over one's library. Having to recollect the particular app to open to find a particular book sucks. But worse, the horror stories of cancelled accounts and subsequent loss of all purchased books will keep any thinking person away from anything more than cursory purchases.

Fix these two problems and the eBook deluge will really begin. Until then I wouldn't even be surprised to see a drop in sales.

bryanlarsen• 11 years ago

13"? E-book readers should be smaller, not larger. A phone size e-book reader would be perfect for fiction. It would be crazy lightweight, you could read all day without having to rest your arm to hold your book.

The size is also perfect for reading: your eye can focus on several entire lines simultaneously without any eye scan.

I have several nice e-readers, but I always read on my phone because the size is much more comfortable. That forces me to sit up so I can rest my arm in my lap.

In the dark an OLED screen will always be superior to e-paper due to the lack of a backlight.

adrusi• 11 years ago

But you need a larger medium for technical books that are filled with diagrams, or if you ever want to read a pdf.

Really you'd want a device in the shape of an A4 or US letter paper.

Phones, especially 5"+ phones, are great for reading novels. I don't see the need for a dedicated device for ebooks that can be re-flowed accurately.

sliverstorm2• 11 years ago

Supposedly the paperwhite doesn't use a traditional backlight

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/26/technology/lig...

kruk• 11 years ago

I use Kindle Voyage and the reading experience in the dark is superior to that of iPhone 6. The screen is lit but it doesn't shine in your face, so you can read comfortably for a prolonged period of time.

I still read a lot on the phone because it's always available but with 3G enabled Kindle you can freely switch between the two devices and always pick up where you left off no matter what device you're using.

I somewhat still prefer reading paper books but I do majority of my reading on Kindle. It's always available, it can hold thousands of books and if there is a book you want to read chances are you can get it on your device within minutes.

TylerE• 11 years ago

I'd love to see something with a slightly smaller screen than the kindle voyage, with physical page turn buttons ON THE BOTTOM, for comfortable one handed reading. Ideally physical buttons on all 4 sides so it works however you want to hold it.

jerf• 11 years ago

I consider my 7" Nexus tablet to be more comfortable to read than a trade paperback already. I fiddled with the Kindle app settings quite a bit (light text on dark background, set the font somewhat large because, what, I'm going to run out of paper?), but I'd rather read novels that way now than the weird ways you have to hold a trade paperback.

Well-bound hardcovers are a bit of a harder call. But still, I'd contend a lot of people's "comfort" with such books is still just familiarity. Hardcovers can still poke you, when brand new can still be stiff and pages can tend to flip themselves back and are really fairly particular about how they are held... I mean, I don't want to make it sound like reading a book is some sort of physical ordeal, my point is merely that, well, both ebooks on easily-available hardware and real books are really quite trivial now and to the extent that there is a difference, it isn't much.

Why, the Kindle app even occasionally accurately captures the experience of dropping the book on the floor and losing your place when you accidentally pull up the bottom bar and then accidentally swipe 50% forward into the book! And it replicates the experience of finding your place again by finding where the pages start sticking together because they've never been opened (there's a little marker left in the book's scrollbar when you jump somewhere). Really the verisimilitude has gotten out of hand in ebook apps if you ask me.

ghaff2• 11 years ago

Ebook fiction (and other linear mostly text) is great on a Kindle Paperwhite and mostly good on a tablet. It's lightweight and easy to read even if the lighting isn't perfect and I can hold an entire library when I'm traveling.

The main downside is that I can't pass it to someone else or buy "free"/cheap (+ shipping) used copies.

A graphically rich book tends to be less good (or, at least, hit or miss with tablet better than epaper Kindle) and I find the ebook model tends to fall down completely for certain types of books where you flip back and forth or stick sticky bookmarks in like cookbooks or guidebooks. Searchability should be a win I guess but I just don't like them.

Because I read most of my books when I travel, I tend to buy ebooks (even if they end up costing more) for what's likely to be linear text and physical books for everything else.

sliverstorm2• 11 years ago

Bulky? My Kindle is smaller in every dimension than any book I've ever read. As for 13" tablets, I don't want a 13" tablet for reading gumshoe novels.

I think there is a sharp divide that needs to be drawn. Biology textbooks require an entirely different kind of device than Harry Potter. Books already acknowledge this- the paper, size, ink, hell even the binding & covers are completely different.

I agree that the biology-textbook-format readers have a ways to go, although I think that's largely a question of demand. There is little market interest in a 14" 4x3 tablet (which is the digital equivalent to the 8.5x11 format). I'm bummed because I have a number of magazines and reference books I'd like to have on tap.

Turing_Machine2• 11 years ago

Why do you need full color or any of the other things you mention to read novels?

When it comes to textbooks or art books, yes. Monochrome is fine for novels.

The eInk Kindles have quite a long battery life, too.

manicdee• 11 years ago

I use my iPad Mini 3 for reading PDFs such as data sheets, schematics of circuits, photography books, and so forth.

I can understand your interest in larger screens such as the iPad Air 2, but there are so few book I even have access to (much less, use) that are that kind of format. The largest books I regularly use are O'Reilly publications.

My notes are usually taken in A5 spiralbound notebooks, or Field Guides pocket books. A4 is a gigantic format for me.

As for ownership of books, I buy DRM where possible, and strip the DRM from the books which aren't available any other way. So I have Michael C Feathers, "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" in my iBooks library even though it is exclusively a Kindle book. Yes, I had to taint my credit card with the stench of Amazon, but I won't let them take back something they have already sold me. Especially when the electronic version costs more than the paper one!

viraptor• 11 years ago

I think it really depends on the audience, location, expectations, etc. I started to read ebooks at the time when my device was (seriously) SL45i - that's around 20x8 letters if you can handle small text. At that point it was already better than books because I could actually get the texts I could not get locally. For me that meant I could read a lot, in original (not translations), ... for free (ebooks weren't really sold at the time...).

And already at that point I said it was better than carrying books around. I could read on the bus on the way to school, even with the backpack already full of stuff I needed to take. Now I buy .epub/.pdf versions without protection whenever possible, but also got a lot of google play books. Honestly, apart from one or two, I don't expect to re-read them later and if my google library disappears for some reason, I don't care. (which doesn't mean I don't say DRM/file-rental is bullshit and shouldn't exist anyway)

I haven't experienced the "particular app to find a particular book" issue in ~15 years. At the moment I have two apps - play books (store + epubs) and kindle (just one or two books not available on play). I rarely had more than one in the past.

Maybe my experience is different than yours - but just saying that we're doing way better than in the last decade. And for some of us the last decade was already enough to drop physical books whenever possible.

SwellJoe• 11 years ago

"bulky, non-ergonomic and expensive" and you want a 13" tablet for reading!?

I have a Kindle Paperwhite and a Nexus 7, both are perfect for reading books; I don't find them bulky or non-ergonomic (except the zooming problem which I have on all multi-touch devices...I don't seem to have the motor control required to effectively use multi-touch screens). A friend had one of the 10" Kindles and I found it bulky and non-ergonomic. It was just too big. I can't even begin to imagine trying to curl up in bed with something the size of a mid-sized laptop screen!

Current tablets are already cheap, full-color, and have quite long battery life (though not as long as the original Kindles which had tremendous battery life, or the current gen Kindle e-ink models which last a week or so).

Your point 2 is valid, and I agree with it, but not enough to not buy ebooks. I have read more books in the past five years of having a Kindle than at any time except when I was in school and read to escape the tedium of my teacher's talking. And, your predicted deluge of ebook buying has begun, and there has not been a drop in sales, though some of the old publishers are feeling the pinch, thousands of independent authors have stepped in to fill the space.

throwwayZfF93• 11 years ago

eBook ownership is confusing and tied to particular companies which exert authoritative control over one's library.

This is easily remedied with about 30 minutes of googling and fiddling with the right software. Once you have the software installed, it is pretty easy to strip the DRM from all your ebooks. You will be able to keep them forever and pass them on to your grandkids.

shmerl• 11 years ago

2. eBook ownership is confusing and tied to particular companies which exert authoritative control over one's library.
Fix these two problems and the eBook deluge will really begin.

If you want to fix #2, don't support those who publish e-books with DRM by buying them. I.e. vote with your wallet.

influxed• 11 years ago

When I traveled to eastern Ukraine for work a couple years ago, what surprised me the most about the culture was the ubiquitous use of ebook readers. It seemed like everyone had one.

When I asked a Ukrainian colleague why they were so popular, he said it simple: ebooks are cheap/free and easy to find, and print books are expensive and require effort to obtain.

One of the biggest points of friction to consuming content is discovery and paying for it. I think when it's easier to find ebooks and cheaper to purchase them, adoption will really accelerate. Until then, there isn't much compelling reason to switch.

Max_Mustermann• 11 years ago

I'd wager most of the books your Ukrainian friends alludes to are the astoningly easy to find pirated epubs. There's zero to none friction if you know how to look for them and don't mind reading in English.

I found odd that the author didn't mention piracy.

dexterdog• 11 years ago

He did mention Ukraine. Did he need to be redundant?

tjr• 11 years ago

https://stallman.org/ebooks.pdf

kentosi• 11 years ago

The title of that PDF should be changed from "The Danger of Ebooks" to "The Danger of DRM Ebooks".

falcolas2• 11 years ago

I don't buy as many Ebooks as I would like to for one reason: for the restrictions which have been put in place, they are too expensive.

I'm renting a (typically lower overall quality) book, but I'm having to pay the price of a new physical book (give or take a few dollars).

OK, there's two reasons: about 1/3 of the books I'd like to purchase are unavailable in Ebook form without pirating.

The value is not worth the price.

gress3• 11 years ago

How are you renting your ebooks?

sib• 11 years ago

I believe the grandparent is making the point that (s)he does not truly own the ebook, since it is delivered with DRM and subject to the ability of the retailer to delete it.

res0nat0r• 11 years ago

Price is also the major factor for me. I've bought probably close to 40 hardcover nonfiction books, mostly used, off of amazon within the last year. Ranging from 4$ to 20$ for brand new stuff I really want to read as soon as they come out.

If the price of an ebook is not going to go down with age, or popularity, and I can't resell it to make money, I'm not going to buy the,

quanticle• 11 years ago

Especially for non-fiction, ebooks are lacking the "flippability" (for lack of a better term) that print books have. The slow response time of e-ink, IMHO is a big factor in that. I was trying to read David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years on my Kindle, and I eventually caved in and got the print book because the Kindle version frustrated me when I tried to flip back to review earlier points in the books.

I would posit that this is why e-books are still far behind print when it comes to textbooks. Even Millenials prefer print textbooks, even as they adopt e-books for other purposes.

yawz• 11 years ago

On the other hand, "search" is much more advanced in e-books. Taking notes, bookmarks, etc. It's just that e-paper/e-ink isn't as responsive as tablets. It'll come, though. It's only a matter of time.

mikekap99• 11 years ago

Textbooks are heavy and carrying a few of them can be burdensome. When I was a college student I walked everywhere and used e-books so I would have a lighter backpack.

bokonist• 11 years ago

I switched to reading most non-fiction on my ipad, for exactly this reason.

jhanschoo• 11 years ago

Interestingly, I have the opposite preference as a college student and avid non-fiction reader.

I like reading PDFs and ebooks of texts in a window while taking notes with emacs in Org mode. I structure my notes with the chapter-section-subsection-etc. structure of the text, and in this manner, I always have a good gauge of my understanding of the text, and am more confident with jumping around to the chapters that interest me more or are more relevant.

This has been so useful for me that I've started to refrain from reading long non-fiction texts that are not amenable to this structure, as I'm less likely to be able to recall and apply information learned that have not been hierarchically organized, given equal investment of time and focused effort.

wkdown• 11 years ago

This is a good point. I love my Kindle and I read fiction and non-fiction on it regularly. However, anything technical I vastly prefer print. I cannot really say why, other than traversing a technical book is just "easier" to flip around with versus a linear progression like other books.

Turing_Machine2• 11 years ago

1. "Single digit growth" is still growth. Even if you accept their numbers (which have some severe problems, as noted below) compounding will take its toll eventually.

2. As the author himself notes (although buried way down in the article), these "official" sources fail to capture a very large portion of the ebook market. Specifically, they only reflect books with an ISBN, which is not required by any of the major U.S. ebook vendors (Amazon, Apple, B&N). Most indie authors don't bother, given the insane pricing schedule that Bowker imposes for small quantities of ISBNs.

sheepmullet2• 11 years ago

Publishers could lower the price of ebooks and still make more than they would on a paperback? Right?

Surely printing costs, distribution costs, and retail costs for a physical book dwarf the listing fee that Amazon et al charge for an ebook?

ghaff2• 11 years ago

Actually, if you look at the numbers, the physical costs of printing and distribution are a pretty small portion--maybe $2 or so. And I can publish a POD trade paperback and get the same profit per book by setting the price just a few dollars higher. A lot of people assume that the cost of physical book publishing must be way higher than ebooks but it's really not.

shabble2• 11 years ago

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/cmap-9-e... (and the rest of his 'Common misconceptions about publishing'[1] series) covers this idea in quite some detail, and ultimately concludes that the majority of the cost is in the pre-production processes, not the physical book printing.

Exactly how ebook pricing relates to any form of sanity is something of another matter. IIRC Amazon, Apple, etc all take something like 30%+ of the sale price, and the retail book industry (after allowing for unsold returns and all the weird accounting jiggery-pokery) operates on quite thin margins.

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...

sheepmullet2• 11 years ago

It sounds like the actual pre-production process is cheap ($7-20k for a book).

After reading his blog a fair bit it seems clear that Amazon is the real winner and that they pocket the savings from switching to ebooks (they take up to 70% of the sale price!).

acabal4• 11 years ago

Some in this thread have already mentioned platform lock-in/DRM, which is a huge issue, the elephant in the room really. But the other huge issue I encounter very often is the absolute garbage typography and formatting of even commercial-grade ebooks.

For example, of the ebooks I've read, 80% of them that were sourced from books that were in print before the ebook era are clearly slap-dash OCR jobs that never even got a proofread from a frazzled intern. Even modern books, those published this year or recently, are subject to this sort of mistreatment, though at a lower rate. King's Dark Tower series is a great example of this: when I bought the ebooks from Amazon a few years ago, they were filled with spelling errors, mis-curled quotation marks, errant or missing hyphens, broken paragraphs, and so on. And I paid nearly the same price as a print version!

Even if an ebook isn't an awful OCR hackjob, publishers seem to insist on dragging our collective decade of experience writing web pages and the HTML5-based epub3 spec through the mud. An ebook is, at its core, nothing more than a handful of HTML pages and some metadata. Ebook readers, at their core, are web browsers. Yet commercial ebook developers insist on using outrageously bad markup that confuses a device's simple mind, awful custom styling that stomps a device's sane defaults, and markup that's only compatible with one or two platforms. (Amazon is partly to blame for this, because their stubborn and idiotic insistence on the god-awful mobi format instead of the open and sane epub format means many producers have to trust automated tools to convert between the two.)

Free ebooks aren't excused from this either; books from Project Gutenberg are also hit-or-miss in quality, mostly miss. (Though that may be because many of their ebooks were produced before ereaders and modern standards were even a thing!)

All of that together makes ereading a distinctly sub-par experience compared to the beauty that centuries of typographical knowledge produces in print books.

I'm working on a public-domain project, standardebooks.org (not online yet), to help nudge the industry in the right direction. The idea is to promote a rigorous typography and coding style guide to public-domain books transcribed at Gutenberg. Anyone can use these guides, our toolchain, and the ebooks produced from them as a sort of "best practice" for creating high-quality epubs that look great on any modern ereader. If you're interested in helping, drop me a line.

jpatokal3• 11 years ago

Otherwise +1, but characterizing EPUB as "sane" is rather charitable of you. EPUB 2 is an incompatible fork of XHTML c. 2001 with crude CSS and proprietary cruft, and EPUB 3 is still largely unusable in practice.

acabal4• 11 years ago

I disagree on epub3; Standard Ebooks is using it as a base format. While it certainly is a sometimes-strange mix of XHTML and HTML5, and there are things I'd personally have done differently, as a means of presenting static documents it rivals the power that HTML5 on desktop browsers has. (Because it's basically just HTML5!) Whatever formatting limitations there are are generally are on the client rendering side--for example, Kindles are notoriously bad at rendering tables, but that's because the Kindle renderer sucks, not because any of the competing standards don't have good <table> tag support.

Plus, since it's basically HTML in a zip file, anybody with basic web page production knowledge can jump in to producing an epub book. Sure there's some epub-specific cruft here or there but the core HTML markup has been well-understood for a decade.

Additionally, the power of HTML5 and epub's semantic inflection standard lets us mark books up in fascinating new ways that aren't easily possible in simpler formats. Whether or not that ends up going anywhere we have yet to see; another thing Standard Ebooks is trying to do is add semantic inflection to the books we produce.

Yes, it's not great for more complex stuff like interactive ebooks or javascript and so on, but no format is yet, and ereader technology isn't really there yet either.

wtallis• 11 years ago

Have you or anyone you know of done a feasibility study for TeX-quality layout being done in realtime on current mobile hardware? [La]TeX itself obviously isn't well suited to the task even if you make the obvious optimizations like rendering each chapter on-demand as a separate file, but since it is the gold standard for automated layout with good typography it would be interesting to know where the bottlenecks are.

acabal4• 11 years ago

No, but since ebooks are just HTML documents the layout the code generates isn't particularly bad. It depends on the renderer of course. Renderers like iBooks even support fancy things like automatic ligatures and so on.

CSS is growing to include more typographic details like the ability to specify lowercase numbers, etc., and when the epub spec and ereader renderers catch up to that we'll be doing pretty well for ourselves. Maybe not TeX-well, but pretty damn well.

jay_kyburz• 11 years ago

I think the other side of the DRM elephant is piracy. Books are so small compared to movies, a few hundred meg can provide years of reading material.

It can be hard to find a pirate copy of a single book, but it's fairly easy to find a huge package of hundreds of fantasy or science fiction books.

I think there are some interesting opportunities for startups to explore new publishing models. I think authors should be looking at what is happening with free to play games or crowdsourcing.

It might be hard to convince investors there is serious money in fiction, but people like to be entertained and I think there are ways you can get people excited about, and spending money on, written stories.

Actually, if anybody wants to toss ideas around I'd love to chat some more.

aolagers• 11 years ago

There seems to be something wrong on site. All the book links currently return 404.

But the project itself is really interesting. Definately bookmarked. Formatting on some Project Gutenberg books has indeed been awful.

acabal4• 11 years ago

The site is still totally broken, and not ready for release. But I hope to have it complete in the coming months.

jpatokal3• 11 years ago

Back in 2012, I wrote a blog post that predicts e-books will be obsolete by 2017 (2 years to go!) and outlining a few reasons why. TL;DR:

Crippled by territorial license restrictions, digital rights management, and single-purpose devices and file formats that are simultaneously immature and already obsolescent, they are at a hopeless competitive disadvantage compared to full-fledged websites and even the humble PDF. ... But once publishers start breaking ranks (as they are already doing) and major authors start to self-publish (as they are already doing), the illusion of e-books being a necessary simulacrum of printed books will start to dissipate.

http://gyrovague.com/2012/04/30/why-e-books-will-soon-be-obs...

na85• 11 years ago

DRM is what's the matter. If I go down to Chapters, I own the book. An ebook from Amazon is just "licensed"

What’s the Matter with Ebooks?

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