More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
Steve Jobs still doesn’t think much of dedicated e-readers
September 9, 2009 | 5:58 pm
|
By Paul Biba
This is from a Q&A between David Pogue and Steve Jobs in the NY Times:
Q. Has your opinion of e-readers changed?
A. I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing. But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device. You notice Amazon never says how much they sell; usually if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.
We don’t see that it’s a really big market at this point. And in the future, the more general-purpose devices will tend to win the day.
I’m not sure that Amazon, as an example, really cares that much about being in the hardware business. If I were Amazon, I’d love selling stuff where I didn’t have to have a warehouse, didn’t need UPS.
|
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
Actually, I’d say he was right, if he’d amended his comments to be: “Most peoplejust probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device.”
We do seem to agree on the idea that Amazon marketed the Kindle specifically to create a market for its e-books. That means they can license the Kindle at some point, and get back out of the hardware business.
Sure makes sense to me. The fact that everyone got so excited about reading ebooks on their iPhone is also evidence that hardly anyone wants a dedicated reader. I believe that whatever success Amazon has had with the Kindle is mostly due to gadget hounds and ebook early adopters. It makes even less sense in college where everyone has a laptop anyway. The price of portable devices and the fact that one has to recharge them is going to favor a small number of general-purpose devices for the forseeable future.
In fact, if I have to carry around a laptop or webtop, why can’t it make phone calls? That’s what I want.
I’m not like most other people. I’d much prefer a dedicated device that makes reading ebooks as good as possible and eink does that better than the multipurpose LCD devices. I don’t want to make phone calls or read emails on a handheld device. I actually kind of like being disconnected and unreachable.
How much reading time will I get from an iPhone? Maybe six hours. So what I’m going to do on a flight from Seattle to Washington DC? (6 hours in the air without layovers) Watch the dumb in-flight movie? I could bring a book, of course, but that kind of defeats the purpose of ebooks.
Perhaps most people don’t want to read more than a easy-read short novel – or not at all. However for the rest of us (and let’s face it, no book publisher is going to make money out of the 2 novels per year reader) I can see a combination ereader/MP3/email device being very useful, but we’d probably settle for a really good ereader with mark-up and annotation facilities (and perhaps an MP3 player for audio books). Steve Jobs makes a lot of money out of selling to a very specific market, but it is not going to be the market that buys lots and lots of books.
True: Jobs sells to a segment of people who do a lot of leisure things, and e-books can be a part of that. I’m sure he sees his products as items that can “do that, too,” making them more useful to more people. That’s what Apple is about, and why I wouldn’t expect them to sell a dedicated reader when a tablet, laptop or iPod Steroid could do the job.
I’ve never considered buying an iTouch just for reading… but to be my organizer, calculator, music or photo album, currency converter, note taker, etc, etc… and an e-book reader too… it is a worthwhile device.
A self imposed obstacle for adoption of dedicated hand-held readers is mimicry of paper books. Book mimicry has too many conventions of navigation, legibility, persistence, authentication and ownership. Even the marketing convergence for promotion of books sales of all formats would be better served by a highly connected general purpose device.
If I were Amazon, I’d hate selling stuff where I didn’t need a warehouse or UPS. Supply chain, warehousing and fulfillment is hard stuff needing massive capital investment, representing a massive barrier to entry. Anyone can compete with Amazon to sell virtual product online.
Unfortunately, I’d say it this way: most people don’t read, or only read occasionally. According to a 2004 study:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/21/AR2007082101045.html
27% read no books in the previous year
62% have read 0-9 books.
I don’t know what the magic number is, but I’d expect that you would need to be a frequent reader to make a ‘dedicated’ book reader worthwhile. I’d guess over 12 books per year?? Of course, many of those would never give up the tradition of paper books. So, I’d guess that the potential market is somewhere below 20% of the total.
The good news is that, following the pareto distribution, I’d estimate that these 20% are heavy readers that consume about 80% of all books read in a year. Therefore, if you are a book store and you can penetrate them, you can capture a large percentage of book sales with a relatively small percentage of devices.
I think your article is incorrectly quoting Jobs with that last paragraph, which isn’t in the linked NY Times article. I don’t know if the Times article was edited since you quoted it, but what Jobs actually says is:
“I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing,” he said. “But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day. Because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device.”
He said that Apple doesn’t see e-books as a big market at this point, and pointed out that Amazon.com, for example, doesn’t ever say how many Kindles it sells. “Usually, if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.”
As was shown with music and MP3′s it’s not how much you listen/read, or even the quality of the experiance, it’s portability that counts. A dedicated ereader is perfect for travel, including the daily commute on public transportation. I don’t know where these people who don’t read live, but they certainly are not riding the New York subway. Most people on the subway seem to be reading something, bibles, paperbacks, hard cover books, printouts, work papers. All of these things can be read on an ereader today and with the new Sony 600 you can even write notes in the margin. My ereader can already do books, documents and music, and get static feeds of newspapers and blogs. If we could add email I could get rid of the blackberry and use a smaller phone. I wouldn’t want to take a phone call on a 6 inch or larger device, so I’ll pass on ebook/phone combinations for now. The biggest thing preventing most people from buying an ebook at this point is the need to connect most of them to a computer to download books, and other media, and a price point higher than $100 TO $150. Once those barriers are crossed I think you will see an upsurge in purchases. This could easily be done by some type of subscription model. Color will also capture more of the market for newspapers, magazines and anime. That’s my idea of a multifunction device, being able to read all types of reading matieral on a single device, not a device that can do everything so-so, like an iphone.
Michael, even a daily reading habit doesn’t directly equate to the need for a dedicated device. I read daily, and I’m perfectly happy doing so on my PDA.
There will always be people who like separate things that do one thing at a time, and others who want one thing to do it all. Dedicated readers have their place, right beside netbooks and PDAs and laptops. But I think the majority of people prefer partially or totally converged devices, to keep down the clutter.
I think Jobs is dead-on with his comment about Amazon’s likely desire to have significant sales that do not require UPS.
But think about reading for a second. The argument has been made that e-ink readers do not make us read ‘differently’. That, I believe, is true. But reading *as an activity* is different, both physiologically and intellectually, than *anything else we do*. We interact far differently with a long-form text than we do with a blog, or an online vendor, or someone we’re talking to (or texting); or Twitter, Facebook, etc. That, coupled with the fact that at least for now, e-ink is by far the superior electronic reading medium, and *totally inferior* for electronic ‘anything else’, has me perfectly happy to have a reading device that will not ever *ring*. Like most serious readers, if I am reading a long-form text, it is *never* because I have time to kill until someone calls. It is because I feel like reading. And I *don’t* want to have to modify a bunch of settings in order to be able to read uninterrupted.
(p.s. And: for those times when I am reading while waiting for something — bus, doctor, etc. I do read on my iPod Touch.)