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Originally Posted by plib
FFS. It might not have been a Kindle or a Kobo but I was reading ebooks on a Palm Zire71 in 2003. It might not have been a game changer at the time, but it certainly should have been an indication to someone whose livelihood depended on predicting the future of his industry. That is if they even knew what a Zire71 was.
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You know who else was reading on a Palm in 2003? Mike Shatzkin, publishing consultant. And he predicted that the Kindle would fail:
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When the Sony Reader arrived and didn’t do much, I wasn’t surprised. Sometime before it debuted, I wrote or said somewhere that if you carried a personal digital assistant, nobody should have to explain the value of ebooks to you. And if you didn’t carry a personal digital assistant, they might not actually have any value for you. At that point, most ebooks purchased were read on laptop and desktop computers.
That’s why I was pretty sure the Kindle wouldn’t work. Who wanted another device to carry around just to read books, I figured? What’s the advantage in that?
I neglected to think through that people do things for lots of different reasons. And I really underestimated the degree to which the book-sized page is a requirement for a lot of people, even though it might be a transitional one. Anyhow, I was really, really, really wrong. And even though I switched back from Kindle to iPhone reading the minute the vast selection available through Kindle (and now through Nook, Kobo, Google, and Apple) was available to me on the device I was always carrying, I fully accept that most people are willing to carry something around to do their reading on a regular-sized page. Lesson learned.
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There were people who were sure that Microsoft would be leading the ebook revolution. Where are they now? Others thought that Rocketbooks would be the dominant bookstore. Remember them? If we were to roll the tape back to 2006, who would have thought Amazon would be king of the ebook hill? Who had even heard of Kobo? Who would have thought that Borders would be no more? Who would have thought that tens of millions of people would be reading ebooks on Apple and Google devices?
I am quite certain that every one of those here who attack the publishers for getting it wrong have missed those too , looking forward from 2003 or even 2006.