Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
I think the "mass market" has had plenty of time to get used to the hassle... enough that they've had time to go to the stores and say "Stock some e-readers, please!" and call the publishers and say "Release my books in the formats I want!"
The fact that they haven't done these things is largely because the mass-market doesn't know e-books exist in the first place. And I also agree that, when they do find out about them, they don't want to have to go through the trouble of opening one web site to buy a book, open another piece of SW to convert the book, and open a third to get it into their reader. They want pathetic simplicity... the iTunes package. As hard as it might be for those of us in this forum to accept, it really does have to be that stoopid easy for everyone else.
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I don't agree. You're coming from the perspective that computers are new to people, that's more and more not the case. Look at it like this, as portable computers (and I don't mean laptops) become widespread, and they will, people that read will want to read books on them, and at that point they will discover that using ebooks warts and all is a LOT easier than using pbooks. It's what happened to everyone of us on this forum. The big factor holding ebooks back is the lack of widespread portable computers.
And since everyone seems to bring up the Itunes model, one factor you all seem to be overlooking is that the ipod itself is a sexy device, its a device people want to have for itself. Nobody (except ppl on this forum) buys an ipod so that they can use itunes, they buy it because they think its cool.