Quote:
Originally Posted by secretsubscribe
Book selection is a big problem when it comes to wider acceptance of ebooks.
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In fact, it's probably the single biggest problem to widespread adoption. Let's face it, if a person could get literally any book they wanted, they could just pick the reader they liked, and run with it. Especially if they could convert every book they owned to digital files... man, I'd be off and running, and there would be only one bookshelf of rare hardbacks left in my house!
It's the chicken-and-egg problem: You need e-books to make e-book readers viable... you need e-book readers to make e-books viable.
But to convert every book that's not already in electronic form (because now we know, publishers created electronic files for printing, but they generally deleted them once the print run was done)... that would take a gargantuan, multi-national, probably government-overseen effort. We already know that if we wait until the publishers do it themselves, it'll never get done. So, how to accomplish that? Subsidized organizations with public/private/govt oversight? New job for the Library of Congress? Project Gutenberg on uber-steroids?
Until we figure out that nasty conundrum, all we can do is try for a reader that will be easy and fun to use, to get them into people's hands. You can look at this as a chicken-and-egg problem, and get stuck behind the paradox... but on the other hand, if you can provide the chicken, the egg won't be far behind, and the paradox is gone.