Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it. And the same best wishes for other TeleRead community members, about their respective holidays, including Chanukah, my own. Happy New Year, too!
At the industry level, what do you want for 2010? Here are the “gifts” I’d like:
–Lower prices for e-book gizmos. They’re still typically about $200 and up, although I have seen the JetBook Lite on sale for around $130, a price no longer in effect, alas. Just what will hardware will it take for e-books to become a mass phenomenon? Of course, people can spend less than $50 to read them on used PDAs and cellphones or go with low-cost netbooks, or maybe wait past 2010 for One Laptop per Child’s XO-3, which is supposed to cost well under $100 in time.
–Better screens. E Ink still lacks decent contrast between text and background. The two most promising alternatives seem to be Pixel Qi and mirasol, shown in the left on a Kindle-style mockup.
–Wider selection of e-books. Despite initiatives like Google’s, just a fraction of the world’s books have been digitized, and I still can’t find many literary greats in E. Hello, Saul Bellow’s estate?
–DRM back-offs. Ideally no DRM, but if not, social DRM: names and addresses or other personal information embedded in books to discourage copying.
–ePub for the Kindle, as well as a nonDRMed Kindle store at Amazon, along with the dropping of those stupid restrictions against text to speech on some Kindle books. In general: ePub everywhere, while still respecting the needs of people with legacy formats. In a related vein, I’d like the International Digital Publishing Forum to follow through on past promises to do an ePub logo, which now seems likelier than ever under president-elect George Kerscher. Good luck, George. We need a speed-up on the IDPF standards-making process, too, so that, for example, there can be reliable interbook linking, especially for the forthcoming era of cloud computing—or cloudbooks, as I’ll call ‘em (just a neologism for “networked books).
–Progress toward a well-stocked national digital library system in the TeleRead mode, with the system to be integrated with local schools and libraries and other institutions. The library is just the start. The same hardware could be used for e-commerce, medical and tax forms and other additional uses to help cost-justify the program. So far, no comment from the Obama White House on the Huffington Post column where I laid out the latest version of the plan.
If epub ever comes to the Kindle, that may sway me over, although I do have some privacy concerns about the Kindle. I have a ot of non-Amazon content, and I don’t want to get in trouble for it.
I hope we finally see a consumer revolt about geographical restrictions, and perhaps the beginnings of an end to them.
I would also like to see authors banding together and bringing about some change, both for themselves and for readers. I remember questioning why the RWA does not do this, and a commenter here said that is not their function. Well, maybe it should be 🙂 These authors need to make sure their readers can get the books they want, it’s profit to them to do so.
Ficbot: All great points. An end to geo restrictions is long overdue!
Merry XMAS and thanks for all your contributions to TeleBlog!
(Same to Paul Biba, Chris Meadows, Court Merrigan, Kat Meyer, Robert Nagle, Steve Jordan, and others, including our valuable commenters!)
David