Bookstores fight back!

[Harmon]

The Book vs. The Kindle

]http://thegreenapplecore.blogspot.com/

[ziplizard]

OMG! You can't resell digital copies, but you also can't find free copies of hard copies of copyright free books in bookstores.

And OMG #2! There's a contract when you buy something. I guess you don't have an email account or a cellphone or cable tv or a job or anything else that requires you to sign a contract.

Really, some people just want to complain over anything.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by ziplizard

OMG! You can't resell digital copies, but you also can't find free copies of hard copies of copyright free books in bookstores.

No but you can find them very cheap.

[Slow_hand]

Originally Posted by ziplizard

OMG! You can't resell digital copies, but you also can't find free copies of hard copies of copyright free books in bookstores.

And OMG #2! There's a contract when you buy something. I guess you don't have an email account or a cellphone or cable tv or a job or anything else that requires you to sign a contract.

Really, some people just want to complain over anything.

Some places do really, really have free hardcover and paperback books: http://bookthing.org/faq.html

[markbot]

You can also get free books at the the library....but of course they aren't actually free since they are supported with charity and public funds. thus u pay for it via taxes. Phyiscal libraries are obsolete in a digital age. We should have digital libraries.

Buy Kindle!!! Lower Taxes!!!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by markbot

You can also get free books at the the library....but of course they aren't actually free since they are supported with charity and public funds. thus u pay for it via taxes. Phyiscal libraries are obsolete in a digital age. We should have digital libraries.

Buy Kindle!!! Lower Taxes!!!

No way would I want Amazon to rule eBooks. Don't buy Kindle.

We do have some libraries with eBooks. Boston Public Library has ePub, Mobipocket, and PDF (GASP!).

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

No way would I want Amazon to rule eBooks. Don't buy Kindle.

I agree, but I don't agree.

Surely it would be a bad thing for Amazon to rule ebooks. The reason I say this is that Amazon's view about the potential of ebooks is constricted. But as far as I can see, so is Sony's.

At the same time, it is essential that we buy Kindles, and Sonys, in order to attract competition into the ebook market. It needs to be clear that there is money to be made, so that other businesses come in and try to take the ebook market from Amazon.

Competition is generated by the perception of the potential for profit. Boycotts only work when the existence of profit has been established. That is not presently the case with ebooks.

Face it. Those of us on this board are the early adopters, the heat-seekers, among readers. Early adopters always get screwed. Amazon is screwing us. Sony is screwing us. Apple is getting ready to screw us. But our existence, and toleration of being screwed, is what will ultimately make ebooks workable. Because we represent potential profit, and that potential is going to get too big to be ignored.

Five years from now, DRM will be dead or dying. Five years from now, the ebook universe will be a much better place than it is now. But that won't happen if other businesses look at ebooks and see that the Kindle, backed by Amazon, didn't pan out.

[Musicman]

Originally Posted by Harmon

I agree, but I don't agree.

At the same time, it is essential that we buy Kindles, and Sonys, in order to attract competition into the ebook market. It needs to be clear that there is money to be made, so that other businesses come in and try to take the ebook market from Amazon.

Competition is generated by the perception of the potential for profit. Boycotts only work when the existence of profit has been established. That is not presently the case with ebooks.

Face it. Those of us on this board are the early adopters, the heat-seekers, among readers. Early adopters always get screwed. Amazon is screwing us. Sony is screwing us. Apple is getting ready to screw us. But our existence, and toleration of being screwed, is what will ultimately make ebooks workable. Because we represent potential profit, and that potential is going to get too big to be ignored.

Five years from now, DRM will be dead or dying. Five years from now, the ebook universe will be a much better place than it is now. But that won't happen if other businesses look at ebooks and see that the Kindle, backed by Amazon, didn't pan out.

Bottom line is that there are other alternatives to Amazon and Sony and those should be considered first. Losing market share would be a wake up call to both Sony and Amazon.

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by Musicman

Bottom line is that there are other alternatives to Amazon and Sony and those should be considered first. Losing market share would be a wake up call to both Sony and Amazon.

But are those ereaders as good as what AmaSony offers? I can't say from personal experience, but what I see is that AmaSony offers not only the ebook reader, but a goodly supply of ebooks with relatively small hassle.

I had a conversation with my soon to be 30 year old son a couple of days ago about ereaders. I had offered him my 505, but he has a mac, & said he didn't care to spend time hunting down books on the ministores. In fact, he wasn't keen on linking up to the mac with a cable. Basically, he wants to be able to type a book name into a search field, get the options, chose one, & download it wirelessly to his reader.

That sounds Kindlish to me. The various secondary readers & bookstores don't deliver that.

So while I agree that loss of market share would force Sony & Amazon to offer better ereaders, I think it's going to take a third party aggregator, like Apple & iTunes, or a head on competitor such as Barnes & Noble might become to do the trick.

[Slow_hand]

Originally Posted by markbot

You can also get free books at the the library....but of course they aren't actually free since they are supported with charity and public funds. thus u pay for it via taxes. Phyiscal libraries are obsolete in a digital age. We should have digital libraries.

Buy Kindle!!! Lower Taxes!!!

The place I mentioned lets you have the books forever for free. No cost, not supported by taxes.

And for anther point, I do work at a Library and it is not obsolete. There are limitations to digitization that I more than many am aware of.

One - not everything is available digitally and there are things that never will be. There are specialty and small press and authors (i.e., J.K. Rowling) who will never provide online access.

Two - even where things are digitized, not all have secure archives. There are a couple of services, for example Portico, which have archives which are opened in the event a publisher goes out of business. A book is it's own archive. Many libraries have staff who are knowledgeable in preserving books. No Library has the resources to store or maintain digital archives of their entire collections.

Three - digitization is not equal to print in all cases. We have art journals that are available online which just do not match those available in print. The limits of the common computer monitor are just unable to display the art in full resolution. In addition broadband is still inadequate in many cases to provide an experience equal to phyiscal media. For instance we recently purchased a set of instructional books including some for media applications like Final Cut pro. The physical book included a DVD with examples for editing. When using the online version, one must download the examples. Instead of being able to work directly from the DVD, one must take hours, probably more than half a day to download all the examples. Unfortunately administrators have decided to get rid of all of our physical copies of these books.

Also there are platforms which provide access to online versions of journals which are very slow to load. I mean minutes just to get to a list of current and archived copies.

Many digitized books and journals were not digitized using OCR, and therefore are not searchable.

Four - Libraries have evolved with the times and according to surveys are considered one of the most necessary components of Colleges and Universities - even in the age of digitization. Please go to Duke University's new Library and tell me that it is obsolete.

Five - there are already considerable digital libraries and they are part of, not replacing physical libraries.

Six - digital versions are not always cheaper than their print counterparts.

Seven- there is still a lag in providing metadata for digital resources and there is not a good universal standard for doing so.

Eight - E-readers are here to stay, I hope. I see them as another way to read content, not as a replacement for every book. Though my Library is not using them, many Libraries do lend content for e-readers.

Nine- Libraries are not simply a collection of books. If you think so, you simply mistaken. They are gathering places, places to hear Authors reading books and taking questions, to see films not generally available, places to study, to take classes, to learn to research, to see actual collections of physical items like manuscripts.

Ten- online versions have glitches occasionally. I have yet to hear anybody say "this book is not working", but I hear the same about online resources all the time, usually when somebody needs the information at a critical moment in their research or paper preparation.

I have more but I am exhausted...

[nbvanyoos]

I believe smartphones will do a lot to shake up this industry as the music sharing sites and the iPod did for the music industry. I am a kindle2 owner and love it, but I recently downloaded B&N's eReader and Mobipockets eReader for my Blackberry Storm. It is quite nice, though not for my aging eyes.

However, as a teacher, I can tell you the younger generation is disconnected from dead trees and connected with smartphones. With the Kindle DX available, textbooks may soon go the way of newspapers as students demand online or digital textbooks. If the cost is substantially lower ($50-$150 per textbook now), parents and schools will rally to this cause as well.

In this age of going Green, we might find using trees to produce paperbacks a rather inefficient and ecologically unsound practice. I have nothing against paper or paperbacks, but I crave efficiency in most things I do. I sell more eBooks than paperbacks because the cost is lower and the delivery is instantaneous.

Libraries will never go the way of record stores, they will simply digitize like everything else


Why Can't I Get Anything Done?
http://getanythingdone.wordpress.com

[Slow_hand]

Funny thing is...libraries are about to get into print on demand in a big way. A lot of people still prefer to have that book in hand. So libraries are getting rid of their one copy of a book, and people are paying 25-35 dollars to have a book printed from the digital files. I have heard of one library having 25 print on demand orders for the same book. That's 25 times the paper for something that one book in the library would have provided.

[fugazied]

It would be a bad thing for ANY 1 company to rule e-books (with the possible exception of Google since they are freedom of information good guys mostly).

Diversity is the key to fostering a healthy ebook industry. I know I always mention it, but if Apple's tablet does really come out in October, that will dramatically effect the ebook industry imho. Because of the appstore/itunes and Apple's standing with copyright holder (publishers, TV studios, Movie studios) you can see them getting a good ebook pricing schedule and putting a lot more competition into ebooks pricewise.

A touch device with color, touchscreen, appstore, modern design will also light a fire under other manufacturers probably (in the way the iphone made smart phone companies get moving). So ideally it would improve hardware standards and innovation, currently most ebook readers are clunky and feel like they could have been designed in the 90s, to say the least.

Currently the ebook/publishing industry is still in it's early years, it's similar to where the music/movie industry was in 2002, poor customer service, poor pricing, but it will only get better and eventually paper books will be the medium at a massive disadvantage.