Nobody can question Cory Doctorow's expertise when it comes to writing award-winning Sci-Fi novels and advocating liberalized copyright laws. Whether he is also a good predictor of what the future holds for e-reader devices remains to be seen. From his latest
Locus column, "Put Not Your Faith In Ebook Readers":
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Frankly, book reading just isn't important enough to qualify for priority treatment in that marketplace. E-book readers to date have been either badly made, expensive, out-of-stock or some combination of all three. No one's making dedicated e-book readers in such quantity that the price drops to the cost of a paperback — the cost at which the average occasional reader may be tempted to take a flutter on one. Certainly, these things aren't being made in such quantity that they're being folded in as freebies with the Sunday paper or given away at the turnstiles at a ballgame to the majority of people who are non-book-readers.
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I'm skeptical about selling ebooks as a business model (see my earlier column "You DO like reading off a screen" for more about this), but if I had to bet on a future for e-books, I would take long odds against a hardware reader catching on in any meaningful way.
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Don't weep bitter tears just yet. There will always be someone of the chorus sounding the death knell for e-book devices; at the end of the day, though, extrodinary claims require extrodinary evidence. So far, e-book devices like the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle are experiencing a growth spurt. And I like to believe that this is just the beginning -- at least until someone convinces me of the contrary.
[via
Boing Boing]