Quote:
Originally Posted by weateallthepies
I hope you are right but I'm not convinced by the comparison with the music industry. Music has dealt with format shifts quite regularly during the short lifetime of recorded music and much of that has been driven by either improvements in quality or usability.
The printed word hasn't really had a revolution since the days of Gutenberg which shows that people are extraordinarily happy with books as they are. I hear lots of comments from people who would "always prefer a real book" and I think that's a fairly common view still.
|
I agree. I think the availability of content (enough titles) will be a big hurdle. I can't see a lot of people buying an expensive device only for reading, unless there is a wide range of titles on offer - and that those ebooks also work well on several devices, etc. etc. (all the things we complain about all the time at Mobileread
). Music is "easy" in comparison, it's already in a digital format, and it doesn't need to be translated into other languages. And it's much, much easier to rip a CD than to digitalise a pbook - you can't take your existing books and digitalise them.