Macworld’s Kirk McElhearn reports on his experience browsing Apple’s new iBookstore. He finds a number of problems, many of which he feels will be cured in time.
– Too many offerings have do description and no idea of their length, as well as no related books displayed
– The use of categories is odd “… For example, The Lord of the Rings is listed as part of the “Epic” category—but “Epic” does not appear in the category list. A history book I looked at is in the “Military” category, and some mysteries were listed as “Fiction & Literature.” Better categorization is in order here.”
– Browsing needs to be improved: “What I’ve found most useful, as both a bookseller and buyer, is serendipity—the ability to come across a book you’ve never heard of because it’s on the same table or in the same shelf in a brick-and-mortar bookstore, or on the same page on Amazon.com. The iBookstore fails in this respect. Aside from the books you see on the main page of each category, there are no links to other titles.”
However, the author says: “This is the initial version of the iBookstore, and Apple will hopefully figure out how to get it right. (And in fairness to the company, it’s hard to implement a “Readers Also Bought” feature when you’ve got only a month’s worth of sales data to build off of.)”
Apple is notoriously stingy when it comes to hiring more engineers. This works in the company’s favor sometimes: a smaller company can create new products quicker, and is less subject to inter-division squabbling and turf wars (cf. Microsoft).
But there is a downside to this leanness: when some area of the company explodes, as the iPhone and its app store have done, the company just can’t cope. Products get delayed (MacOSX 10.5 was delayed half a year to reassign engineers to work on the about-to-be-released iPhone), products are released half-baked and unready (MobileMe), and various divisions just grind to a halt (the app store approval process).
Apple finalized the iPad-specific codes and applications with one hand while the other hand was creating iPhoneOS 4.0. Apple doesn’t even expect to release iP4.0 for iPad until this fall.
I don’t expect any swift fixes to the iBooks store. Probably Apple’s #1 priority in that area will be dealing with educational textbook publishers before September.
Apple’s slowness helps Amazon extend the life of Kindle, and may even give Amazon enough time to come out with a color Kindle.
— asotir
I’ve suggested before that eBook distributors have a lot to learn from the second-hand bookstore model, in which the price of a book is essentially determined by three factors:
1) The likelihood of the book being in the store in the first place.
2) The length of time it will probably take to find it or to establish that it isn’t there.
3) How pleasant the bookstore is to browse in.
Thus well-stocked, well-organised bookstores with a pleasant ambience can charge up to ten times as much for their books as a smelly op-shop with an abundance of trashy pulp bestsellers and very little else.
For the record, the last five novels I have read were all published before 1980, and all came from second-hand stores. What are my chances of finding them currently available as commercial eBooks?