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Doctorow: "Don’t count on dedicated e-book devices"
March 5, 2008 | 6:28 am
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By Branko Collin
Author and e-book expert Cory Doctorow published an article in Locus Magazine today in which he explores the economic realities of producing dedicated e-book readers. If Nintendo, he muses, cannot even cajole Chinese manufacturers into ramping up production for their incredibly popular Wii game computer, what chance does Amazon have of getting enough Kindles out the door?
Frankly, book reading just isn’t important enough to qualify for priority treatment in that marketplace. E-book readers to date have been either badly made, expensive, out-of-stock or some combination of all three. No one’s making dedicated e-book readers in such quantity that the price drops to the cost of a paperback — the cost at which the average occasional reader may be tempted to take a flutter on one. Certainly, these things aren’t being made in such quantity that they’re being folded in as freebies with the Sunday paper or given away at the turnstiles at a ballgame to the majority of people who are non-book-readers.
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I’m skeptical about selling ebooks as a business model (see my earlier column "You DO like reading off a screen" for more about this), but if I had to bet on a future for e-books, I would take long odds against a hardware reader catching on in any meaningful way.
Moderator’s note: Also see Cellphones vs. dedicated readers: Why Cory’s PARTLY right, my just-made TeleBlog post. – D.R.
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Comments:
Cory et al write about “Abyssmal refresh rates”?! I’ve never understood why people complain so much about page refreshes. Except for pages with graphics (a special case, I admit), waiting half a second even for the prs-500 has been no big deal. The more bothersome issues are slow startup and somewhat disappointing battery performance (when I haven’t picked it up in a while).
Cybook is a second gen Vizplex device which is much peppier. Page refreshes are still better. My main complaint with Cybook is that it takes forever to scroll through the bookshelf (especially if you have a few hundred books on your memory card). Also, usability wise, I keep forgetting what the side buttons are for.
That said, I think any of the recent batch of e-ink readers do their job well, if only the prices could come down. Doctorow’s argument that e-ink devices may never be mass produced is somewhat more persuasive, but that will follow the demand curve. Kindle has created demand for these type of devices.
“I’ve never understood why people complain so much about page refreshes.”
I believe in this instance it was about refresh for devices that do more than just display books.
My biggest issue about page refreshes is not about the reading experience its about the user interface. Well — I assume its about screen refresh speed — my only experience is on my Cybook, and it may be idiosyncratic to them.
Anyway, the problem is that menu’s and similar interface design elements seem to have to deal with the same relatively slow refresh speed. This leads to many design compromises. For example, in a windows world you might mouseover a menu item, and a sub-menu could pop out to the right. In the Cybook, you would need to select the menu item to get a new dialog.
My biggest problems with the Cybook concern navigating through hundreds of books, or finding my way through a book to skip ahead or back. These are functions that are hampered by the Cybook’s slow interface and response.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my Bookeen, and normal page refresh and normal reading work just fine. However, the interface and navigation leave a lot to be desired.
Michael
I think the problems are the price and the usability. Loading one’s own content onto the ebookwise is needlessly fiddly. And that device, while comfortable re. screen size and visibility, could definitely use some slimming down.