That being said, the simplicity and convenience doesn’t make up for the loss of the actual book. An iPod can hold a near-infinite amount of text, true, but you lose some things. I have no problem with reading on the screen–honestly, an iPod screen is fairly big–but one of the magical parts of a book is that, if you’ve read it enough, you can flip it open and find a random excerpt easily. You can also get a sense for how far you’ve come. There’s something about a physical book, about turning a page, that’s lost in the translation to digital.

I can’t see ebooks becoming the next “big thing” or having an “iPod moment” until they manage to add something that physical books don’t have. Portability? Backlights? Convenient things, sure, but are ebooks better yet? I can see avid readers adopting both forms, but not ebooks on their own–at least not for some years.

Newspapers are in another case, however. Their business model is failing, and they are desperate to latch onto something that will pay them better than online banner ads. Something like Plastic Logic, perhaps, or Kindle, or even iPhone, subscriptions. I personally would like to see cableTV monopolies add ‘newspaper channels’ to their lineups, now that people are moving to hdtv lcd screens.

And ‘books’ should then follow their past history venturing into digital, by latching onto other devices – in this case readers for newspapers.

First, it could take five to ten minutes of searching to find what you were looking for. Most people had modems which meant the download of an album was easily an hour-and-a-half long (often engaging the only available phone line). Once the music was available, it was often poorly labeled (if labeled at all) and improperly ripped. Rather than listen to music on my portable CD player, car, or nice home stereo system, the individual was forced to listen through the crappy computer speakers using a clunky media player (CD burners and discs were expensive).

The technology for digital music eventually caught up and the “market” exploded. Many artists cried foul and declared it the end of music. Publishers tried to shut down the electronics, software, and network providers through whatever means they could find. After a few unsuccessful starts, some of the more entrenched players were convinced to try a new tactic: easily-available product at a price people were willing to pay.

As we keep rehashing, the market for ebooks isn’t as great and that market is split many ways in how the customers wish to use the product. Taking those two factors into consideration, it’s no wonder that publishers are mostly indifferent to electronic distribution. But you’ll see the same thing as the music industry: (at least) five years from now, publishers will wake up to the fact that providing a simple, DRM-free file to an online bookstore and collecting checks will yield significant revenue with almost no expense or overhead.

People are scared to death (or at least the brink of bankruptcy) of significant change in a proven system. The change is inevitable, and, at some point, the industry will be dragged kicking and screaming to common sense, but not before they’ve given everyone else a chance to take the first steps.

Bring along movies, television, and video games to the party and there will be so much money funneled into the entertainment sector that we’ll spend all our time complaining about how we have ruined the next generation of children.

I think there’s also the fact (which I meant to mention in the article itself but forgot) that there’s considerably less difference between how you consume a CD and an mp3 (in both cases, you stick things in your ears and press “play”) than there is between the experience of reading a paper book and reading an e-book.

That gap is narrowing with e-ink, but it will always be there to a certain extent. I suspect that’s the real reason we don’t see more e-book piracy—to the average downloader, mp3s are fungible with CDs in ways that e-books just can’t be with tree-books. So of the declining number of readers who would reach for any book at all, only a small percentage of them would consider e-books workable enough that they’d be willing to try pirating them.

But perhaps that will change as better e-ink readers hit the market…

so it’s a circular argument in my opinion, or a chicken and egg, what comes first the widespread piracy or the widespread adoption – personally I believe it’s both, feeding on each other, so I am a strong believer that widespread ebook adoption means the death of the industry as is constituted now

not the death of literature or anything like that, just a massive reduction in revenue streams since nobody is selling now or going to sell many expensive ebooks

but i also believe that widespread adoption is not going to happen not because publishers refuse to release ebooks since once a book is popular enough or has a fanatical following irrespective of at large popularity, it’s a matter of time until an ebook appears in the wild, but because print books have too many advantages over ebooks

I think the point is still valid. You can find lots of pirated e-books that never were print books. It’s become easier and easier as computing power (and hence, OCR) has improved. A bandsaw and a sheet-feeding scanner, and boom: instant pirate e-book.

But people just aren’t downloading them enough to worry the industry.

not enough publicized piracy because not enough publicized ebooks because not enough publicized piracy because…

once you get interested in ebooks and do some research the piracy part of the article above is just laughable