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The e-book field needs more innovation, not less: CES counterpoint
January 7, 2010 | 6:08 pm
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By Evan Leibovitch
I wasn’t as impressed with Edward Nawotka’s editorial on the recent Consumer Electronics Show as Paul Biba was. In fact, I saw a troubling lack of foresight and even hindsight.
A decade or two ago, someone might as well have said that a Walkman was everything needed to enjoy music. How downright quaint such an opinion would seem now in the post-iTunes era. Likewise, an assertion today that…
“at least for the time being, the devices that we already have are good enough for books in their present form“
…just seems to me to be oblivious to what needs to come. Indeed, in it I hear a plea for no more innovation in the field, and that’s simply unacceptable.
I personally happen to think that the current generation of readers—both standalone and software applications—is pretty shoddy, given the capability of the digital formats they work with. For academic and technical use the current crop is practically useless. We’re at least a generation—and maybe two—before what’s available will have true appeal beyond hardcore readers and early-adopter geeks.
When what you had before was nothing, having something—anything—is an improvement. That explains the pleasure that Mr. Nawotka and apparently many in his family are experiencing with their current readers. But (as long as we’re being anecdotal) in my travels, for every happy e-reader I know, there are dozens who like the idea but don’t think the tech is good enough yet to dive in.
Here’s just a single example of what’s missing: I know people who like to have multiple books open at once and bounce between them. These people are used to—they rely on—tabbed browsers when surfing the net, and every PC and smartphone can do tabs. But no current e-book reader of which I’m aware supports having multiple books open simultaneously.
That’s just one of a laundry list of deficiencies. To many of the potential e-book readers I come across, the existing landscape attracts no better comment than, “It’s a good start, but not yet”. It’s to these people—amongst others—that the CES players have turned their attention.
I would agree that the tablet concept is very over-hyped, and to a large extent a re-hash of existing tech. But getting the most from CES means looking behind the glitzy-but-glacial evolution of the PC. It means getting to the low-rent section in the back of the display hall, where the real innovation is going on. Within those startup technologies that Nawotka dismissed may indeed lie the ideas that turn the industry on its ear. The true payoff of CES is discovering those ideas, and at very least being prepared for them.
The book industry is now where the music industry was about a dozen years ago. The current tech is a nice beginning, but clearly in transition. We haven’t scratched the surface of what’s possible and the best ideas in this field are yet to be seen. Pretending that the change isn’t happening—or at least that one’s own world is immune—does not appear to be prudent
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Also, 640K of RAM is all the memory anyone’s PC will ever need. Just ask Bill Gates.
AFAIK, Johannes Gutenberg was more of an entepreneur, who funded his “research” on the printing press with selling polished metal mirrors for those Christians who wanted to catch the blessings better during religious ceremonies (predating DirectTV?); it was people like Manuccio who had both the technical skill and the cultural background, acting both as publisher and printing press master. From now on we’ll have to rely more on reading technology than before, and people like Bezos or Jobs might play the Gutenberg entepreneur during a transient period
@Chris: I actually researched the Gates quote for inclusion in my commentary. Apparently he never said it.
(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed)
Now… Ken Olson, founder of DEC, saying in 1977 that “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home” … that one is accurate.
“But no current e-book reader of which I’m aware supports having multiple books open simultaneously.”
Au contraire: the eBookwise 1150 allows you to have two books open at once, and one tap of the stylus instantly flips between them.
There’s certainly room for innovation in e-readers but a tabbed view isn’t quite it. “Hardcore readers” — how’s that for a back-handed subtlety? — may indeed reader 5 or 6 books at once, but not flitting back and forth as one consults webpages. Those who pooh-pooh the current e-ink readers are missing the well-executed reading experience in a rush to add “features”. A hardcore reader might well appreciate better indexing of titles on the device, improved internal searching, finger-tip dictionary access and even wikipedia look-ups for “fact nugget surfing”.
One CES report gushed that readers will want HD video chat whilst devouring the latest Stephen King novel. Really? Ever tried reading the same book, page by page, as someone next to you? It’s painful since you’ll never stay in sync.
Another CES report showed what looked like a “heavy” device with two largish screens, the left side being B&W e-ink, the right side a full colour touch screen running Android. The whole thing folds up (closes) like a book. Are you really going to carry something like that to bed, to the bath, to the beach, on the commute?
What’s most likely will be a bifurcation of devices, one for simple, elegant, portable reading with improvements in basic display (colour no doubt) and ease of content management. The key is to meet the needs of the “passive” reader. The other device will “converge”, offering a single, not a dual screen, in some sort of compromise form factor between mass paperback and clipboard, that does a lot more — including academic oriented tasks like note taking — and offers full Internet, credible video and portability for active consumption and creation of content.
I have the equivalent of tabs on my Kindle in that the home page has the latest I have read at the top and one click on a tab will display that book right where I left off, just like a tabbed browser, it just doesn’t take up the screen space that a tabbed browser has because of the limited size screen. The FUNCTION is there however.
I can, however, envision an animation buried in a document that is much better than trying to explain how it works. A specific example is the Prius drive train with its epicyclic gears connected to the wheels, generator and engine all at once. Difficult to explain how that works, easy to see in the animation. Or how about acrobatic maneuvers in an airplane? Or a lot of other things I can think of.
I can remember reading a book on how to fly and pass the private pilot’s license. It was a programmed book, ideal for the computer or any device that can have embedded links like the readers. It displayed a paragraph, asked a question and branched to the answer you selected. If your answer was wrong it reinforced the paragraph with further explanation and gave you another series of answers to the test question. Perfect for a reader and it worked in paper, but awkwardly.
I would predict that we will have color, fast, low power readers in the very near future, certainly within 2 years.
I don’t think Ed was saying that there’s no need for innovation or improvement so much as that the publishing industry shouldn’t be holding its breath for the perfect reading gadget as if it were some kind of magic bullet. The changes going on in book publishing are as much structural as technological, and while there’s certainly the hope that the market in 2010 will diversify and competitors will appear to challenge Amazon’s apparent dominance in the growing sales of ebooks, no one doodad is likely to provide all the answers – even if Apple or someone else comes out with something truly amazing. As @Al points out, there are different markets for different kinds of reading experiences. The challenge for publishers going forward will be to meet all their readers, and potential readers, wherever they spend their time, and to provide books in whatever format – on paper or for any of the many competing gadgets – that they prefer.
I just want to say thanks to all those who took the time to read the editorial I wrote on PublishingPerspectives.com yesterday. Anyone who knows me understands that I am as much of a “gadget guy” as anyone and often an early adopter, so the only thing I’d like to add is that Evan’s suggestion that in my article he “heard a plea for no more innovation in the field” is not in fact the case. I am very much looking forward to better and more user-friendly reading devices. But I simply believe that innovation in e-readers is not going to lead to revolution in reading. The more you add HD video/live chat to a “book,” the further you’re getting away from the experience of “reading” and turning into something different. Perhaps what we’re currently lacking is a word for it — we don’t say we “read” the internet per se, we “surf” it — and some books are eventually going to morph into something that looks more like the internet and not a book. What we need, I think, is a new vocabulary for these new devices and the new content that will take advantage of them. The term e-reader is simply a term of convenience, and quite soon, with the multiple capacities that the new devices will be capable of, it is likely to become a misleading one.