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Originally Posted by radleyp
The reason that ebooks are not selling well has been noted here: there is nothing wrong with the medium of books as they exist today. So what Sony et. al. must do is convince readers that their devices (at $300+) represent an improvement. I have been part of a book club of 12-13 men for the past three years: we meet once a month for 10 months of the year. That's 30 books (only 6 of which were available as ebooks) and up to last month, I was the only one who read ebooks (first on my Palm T3/TX, now on my MotorolaQ). One member got a Sony reader from his wife but then had to call me to learn how to download and install a book (another problem with ebooks).
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I think "nothing wrong with the current format" is the key fact. My original question "So what
are the compelling reasons to buy ebooks and ebook viewers" got largely the responses I expected. They may be compelling reasons for the folks who hang out here. They are unlikely to be all that compelling to the majority of the book reading public. Until that majority gets a compelling reason. ebooks will remain a niche market.
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I found it convenient to have a book with me all the time, but I could have carried a paperback too (the Sony ads now appearing in magazines keep telling the reader that he/she can now carry 80 books at a time, which is just idiotic, since no one, not even students, needs to, so no wonder this thing does not resonate with a bang).
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Nobody
needs to carry 80 ebooks at a time, but some of us
want to. I have several thousand ebooks on my PDA.
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My thinking goes something like this: when we are on the verge of running out of oil we'll find a synthetic, and when we are on the verge of running out of paper we'll all read ebooks. They're just not a necessity now.
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Since trees are a renewable resource, I don't see that happening.
The most likely motivator I can see for the mass market is price. When you can get a decent ebook viewer for the price of an MP3 player, get content for it at a bookstore or off the web, and when said content is significantly
cheaper than corresponding paper editions, we might get some momentum.
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Dennis