Quote:
Originally Posted by SlowRain
I remember reading about Hornby's comments back when he first published them. He was narrow-minded about e-books back then. I was actually surprised because he actually seems to be one of the more open-minded writers out there. I still like him as a writer, but I lost a lot of respect for him as a thinker at that time. I, too, would like to know what he thinks now.
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I think you have to consider his words in light of the options available at the time. If the eInk readers had stayed in the $400 and above price range -- I really doubt that they would have taken off.
I'm not sure if Amazon had started their $10 for new ebook subsidy program when he wrote that. Still, the original selling point of the kindle was that you could save money on books. A $400 device and THEN you have to pay full price for books? Yeah, that's a tough sell.
Fast forward three years. Amazon successfully subsidized the ebook era. They had enough time with the ebook subsidies to sell the kindle when it was still ridiculously expensive. By the time ebook sales really started to take off, and the publishers started to see true cannibalization of their hard cover sales -- the price of the eInk devices could fall enough that you no longer HAD to subsidize ebooks to sell the devices.
Now we have $139 (and some cheaper than $100) -- and that's a LOT easier of a sale. Throw in the iPad and all the smart phones, who add ebooks as just another thing they can do -- and you have a pretty good explosion in ebook sales.
That all this wasn't obvious in 2008 -- I can't really fault him for that. Anyone who would should consider that ebooks had been tried and failed before.
Lee