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2009: E-books’ ‘interesting times’
December 5, 2009 | 3:22 am
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By Chris Meadows
In a recent column, David Pogue looked back at some technological advances that first showed up (or heated up) this year and that have implications for the future. A couple of them—app stores, Netbooks—have minor e-book implications, but Pogue closes with a look at e-books themselves.
The e-book marketplace, Pogue notes, changed considerably this year. Although he only hit a few of the high points, this got me started thinking about all the different ways that e-books have been in the news this year. In no particular order:
There were new offerings from the Kindle in both hardware and software, and new hardware from Sony, too. Companies like BeBook, JetBook, Astak came out with new readers. The CrunchPad made a big splash, then went down the tubes. Tantalizing rumors of an Apple tablet took on some substance.
Barnes and Noble entered the e-book software, then the e-book hardware market. (And as an aside, I got an unintentional chuckle from Pogue’s column with the sentence, “At least on paper [emphasis mine], the Barnes & Noble Nook offers much that the Kindle lacks.”)
Fictionwise lost a large chunk of its MobiPocket DRM’d books when one of its distributors, Overdrive, decided not to renew the distribution contract—reminding everyone once more just how fragile DRM’d purchases are. (Fictionwise then did the right thing and got permission to replace the DRM’d purchases with an alternate format.)
Fictionwise came out with an eReader for Blackberry (though its promised Linux port apparently has not yet materialized).
The FTC looked into Digital Rights Management—though apparently not very hard. Apple rejected an e-book application for allowing access to the Kama Sutra on Project Gutenberg, then changed its mind.
New e-book stores popped up all over the place. Baen Webscriptions became accessible on both BookShelf and Stanza, with Kindle-style instant downloading ability. Sony announced it would be dropping LRF and switching exclusively to EPUB.
Google Books opened its doors to mobile devices—and a little later, caused a controversy when it announced the terms of its settlement with the Authors Guild.
There was plenty of consolidation, too. Fictionwise bought eReader, then Barnes and Noble bought Fictionwise. Amazon bought Stanza.
More than any year that came before it, for e-books 2009 has been what the Chinese might call “interesting times”. I can’t wait to see what 2010 brings.
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Comments:
I’d argue the single most significant event of the year was Sony dropping their proprietary DRM in favor of Adobe’s ADEPT ecosystem. Without Sony in their pocket, Adobe would be nowhere, as I doubt the second-tier vendors would’ve signed up otherwise. And we wouldn’t be having a DRM war.
Chris, there was a key sentence in Pogue’s column which I read two weeks ago: “Slowly, the concept of reading pixels instead of print seemed less and less unusual. …”
He wrote: “reading pixels” and compared it to reading “print”…..he might have started a new way of speaking about reading on screens. I wrote to him right away back then and told him it was a great turn of phrase. “reading pixels” — i like the ring of it!
Chris says, “Fictionwise came out with an eReader for Blackberry (though its promised Linux port apparently has not yet materialized).”
Not to discourage Linux ports, but the Windows ereader works fine under wine.
Probably the most important news has been the war for control over content for without content, none of the other news matters. Here are some of the things that have happened this year.
Amazon’s attempt at a closed Kindle system failed, and they are opening up the Kindle to other sources of ebooks.
Other ebook readers and distributors have fought back against Amazon’s dominance of the market.
Amazon’s Kindle’s text-to-speech feature raised an uproar because Amazon was grabbing a right they hadn’t contracted for, and they were forced to drop TTS.
Amazon has controlled the ebook price by imposing the $9.99 price point on most ebooks, and other distributors are following along. Publishers are grumbling, but they seem resigned to the price.
Google attempted to control content by trying to make all books, no matter what the copyright status, available for free on the web. Publishers and authors have fought them back on this issue.
Google declared “dibs” on books out of copyright and orphaned copyright books, but publishers, other distributors, and author organizations have screamed foul and are fighting it in court.
Many of the epublishers who have been around for years are being acquired by other epublishers. The latest acquisition is Hard Shell Word Factory by Mundania.