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Originally Posted by Liviu_5
Comparisons between e-music and e-books are flawed because of the fact that for music it is very easy to put your cd's on a device like an Ipod, while for books it is very hard to put your p-books on a device like Sony. Were it to exist a magic box to take a p-book and digitize in 10 minutes in the format of your choice, that would be different and you would see more dedicated devices available.
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Comparisons between emusic and ebooks are not flawed, just difficult (I'll save my apples/oranges comparison for another day). Books are just skipping an intermediate format/storage/conversion step. Music and books are both content that people want to bring along with them and products consumers spend a fair amount of disposable income on. Both are marketed by industries run by greedy, short-sighted, fearful, people. Both industries are grappling with the future of digital content, the music industry being a little further down the path.
Although I love the screen and battery life of my Sony Reader, the rest of the Reader and the Connect software experience reminds me strongly of the Creative mp3 player and it's software I experimented with in the 90's.
In the case of Creative, I had plenty of content lying around my house in the form of CDs. I had to find a program to rip them and learn how to use it. There was no CDDB, or at least a ripper hooked to CDDB, so I had to fill in the mp3 tags myself. I had to calculate the megabytes of the music I wanted to listen to to see if it would fit and then drag-and-drop it to the Creative. The Creative had no way to manage playlists other than to manipulate the mp3 tags. It wasn't long before I gave up. Those of you with Readers know this drill.
Then the iPod came along. The genius of iPod is largely in iTunes. Rip/mix/burn and CDDB made it easy to import and manage music. Later, Apple added the iTunes Music Store and that's when emusic really took off. And as much as I despise DRM, the ease of purchase with the iTMS and the a-la-carte nature of the songs was occasionally irresistible.
Granted, Sony Connect has added to the Creative model by adopting the iTMS approach to selling books. And the books are generally cheaper (slightly) than their print equivalents at Amazon. So I gave it a try. I figured if a major company is going to try to make ebooks work and the Reader does have the great screen and battery life then I should support them.
I think Sony Connect/Reader will need a lot more to succeed, to avoid The Curse of the Flop. I don't think the average consumer cares too much about using Book Designer (great program!) to format Project Gutenberg texts. The average consumer wants easier software and cheaper books. But I'm a cynic about the wisdom of the average consumer and I think the vast majority of consumers don't know what DRM is and don't care. It will take years for consumers to understand content portability.
And I'm not too excited about EMI's decision to sell DRM-free music. EMI is still just one (large) company and still a member of the RIAA, an industry organization who thinks the best way to eradicate piracy is to sue it's customers indiscriminately. I think we've still got a long way to go before we emerge from the Dark Ages of DRM. But I believe eventually we will buy almost all of our content in digital form and DRM-free. The Enlightenment.