Quote:
Originally Posted by NatCh
Now it's y'all's turn. What did I miss? Where am I wrong? And what should I be thinking.  |
One thing I think is severely lacking in the ebook world is the fact that you cannot load a paperback into your reader.
Think about it. When the iPod first came about, iTunes sales were
way behind the capacity of iPods sold. Where did all that music come from? People's CD collections. But you can't rip a book into Sony Reader format like you can with a CD to MP3/AAC. The early limitations of music selection were alleviated by the fact that anything on CD could be played by the iPod after importing it into iTunes.
Ebook readers have nothing like this though. Books can be scanned and edited, but this takes a long time and cannot be done without tremendous effort by someone on their home computer. In a way, books are locked down much more than music ever was. Furthering the problem is that the concept of a "book player" that separates the content from its realization is nonexistent in popular culture. The book is the player.
For ebooks to catch on widely, there needs to be a reader that is cheap enough to sell as a single book. Maybe it could be subsidized and books for it could be sold as add-on cards, but people need to think they are buying a nice book rather than a computer or PDA.