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Originally Posted by jxh11215
Well, that article was a ray of sunshine....
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I'd like Paul Theroux more if he could lose the snobby attitude and get over his apparent self-dislike. Still, he's made a career out of trying to run away from himself and writing somewhat gloomy accounts of the journeys, so I guess it works for him.
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For better or for worse, the age of the e-book is upon us. Analysts estimate Americans will buy on the order of 6 million e-readers this year—and by 2014, an estimated 32 million people will own one. What does the proliferation of Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and other e-readers portend for the publishing industry? What does the e-reader mean for writers, for storytelling, for the place of fiction in the cultural landscape?
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I think that most commentaries and predictions about e-reading take too narrow a view, and thereby miss the point - which is that “e-reading” is not just about fiction books.
Like many others, I’ve been reading electronically for well over 20 years. Reading is not just about novels and perceived literary merit, it’s about a very wide range of communications in written form. Both fiction and non-fiction reading come in a huge range of sizes and flavours and by far the most common overall e-reading method is still the computer. I’d suggest that it leads by a massive margin too.
The Nooks, Kindles, etc are fun devices, but compared to computers they’re dull grey-on-grey little plastic gizmos with annoying restrictions. Selling them as being a ‘book-like’ experience is quite a marketing triumph.
As netbooks and tablet style computers get even lighter and more powerful it seems reasonable to believe that they will simply consolidate the massive lead that regular computers already have on overall e-reading. I certainly want to have a comfortable book reading experience, but I also want to be able to read PDFs, illustrated books, blogs, forums, online newspapers and magazines, guides and manuals, as well as view material with audio and video content. Plus, I want to be able to write and generally interact using it. That’s my day to day world and I’m 63. To most young people it’s more or less a given that they expect that kind of versatility.
My guess is that if e-ink readers don’t massively lift their game in the next couple of years then they will be permanently sidelined into a small niche market of buyers who can’t hack backlit screens or who just want the cheapest thing available. The iPad may or may not rule the roost (although a claimed 500,000 in the first week or so sounds like a reasonable start) but tablet style computers in general surely will. I currently have a 10” netbook and a 12” HP tablet style computer and they already do a terrific job of covering all my reading needs at a size and weight that I find very comfortable.
I may well be wrong, but I don’t see literary style fiction being powerful enough to continue to drive a flourishing separate device market for much longer. Not when there’s a broader and more versatile option developing alongside which has already nibbled away most of the claimed size/weight advantages of the e-ink candidates.
Cheers,
Chris