Germany: eBooks not yet a mass market product

[Poppaea]

Originally Posted by CommonReader

Here again we have the absurd situation that books by Feuchtwanger, Musil and Pessoa (in German) are easily available as pirated material in high quality PDFs, yet not as legal ebook.

I am sitting here with my money in my hands to buy them and can't!
But when these publishers will have made up their minds everyone will have gotten them from the darkside.

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by Poppaea

I am sitting here with my money in my hands to buy them and can't!
But when these publishers will have made up their minds everyone will have gotten them from the darkside.

Or has had anough spare time to make the ebooks themselves using paper copies they already own (or got for this purpose), as I already pointed out in several threads.

The longer the publishers wait with offering (unlocked) ebooks for sale (mark I said sale not lease) the more people 'll do so, finally ending up with a paper copy (regardless how old rugged and used-up it may be) and an owneable ebook

[Feylamia]

/sign


I remember how frustrated I was when I found that "The Physician" wasn't available as ebook. I even dabbled in scanning my copy but found the process pretty tiresome with the means I have here at home. (And I cannot be bothered to buy more expensive equipment just to be able to read one single book on my kindle.)

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by karunaji

1 -It definitely worked for GSM networks.

2 - What "just works" may be different things to different people.

3 - I am not sure what you mean with "platform.

1- GSM is not a good model to bring up when discussing competitive markets as it was launched as a *legislated* non-competitive effort that forclosed all alternatives in order to achieve dominance through economies of scale. In markets where GSM was *not* mandated by fiat it was hardly a winner by acclamation and is merely competitive despite its hardware economies of scale. Unless national governments are going to legislate local standards that explicitly exclude the global players generics are going to have a hard time keeping up in mainstream ebooks.

2- Sure. That's an easy enough way to dismiss what is the hardest thing to achieve in consumer electronics. And yes, some people's idea of what "works" includes recompiling ebooks or digging into source code to fix a bug in their software. But the number of people who find that acceptable is a *lot* less than the ones who are more interested in reading a book/running the software/having a life. Again, cellphones are not a particularly good example because there are really two distinct products in there: the communication network which is independent of the hardware (dirt cheap or not) and the device itself which is a platform for user functionality. And the people who need/want a sophisticated experience are not going to be satisfied with a generic dirt-cheap product any more than the people who just want to make two phone calls a week want to pay for features they don't use.

3- A platform is the totality of the elements that define a user's experience with a product. With simple, basic products the product is the platform but with complex sophisticated products the platform trancends the product. The clearest example of a platform transcending its root product is Android which originated as an alternative to iPhone but has migrated to webpads, PDAs, ebook readers, media players, and TVs. Now, don't confuse the OS with the platform as it is merely part of the platform; in the case of connected android devices the platform also includes the app stores, the totality of available apps, the service and support structures (not just from the vendor but all of them), and the communication network it can access. All these things *combined* determine the value the customer derives from the product, often to the point of rendering the hardware almost irrelevant.

Now, when it comes to ebooks---which is still a very immature industry---there are only a few things that can be said with any certainty. But one of those is that in the regions where ebooks have become mainstream consumer products it did not happen until consumers were offered up a fully integrated platform that trancended ebook reader hardware to encompass smartphones, webpads, media players, and PCs. Another is that, regardless of the quality and pricing of the dedicated hardware, ebooks are *not* a mainstream product in those regions that do *have* an integrated transcendant platform. Sure, correlation is not causality but it is one honking big clue of the nature of the beast.

The value of a platform is easily seen with the Barnes & Noble Nook and the Sony Reader line.
Sony makes excelent hardware with rich feature sets. Its support software is admitedly poor. Its ebookstore strictly second rate. And it lacks much of integration with even its own hardware; no Sony reader app for Sony phones, media players, or PSP. Still Sony was the first major player in dedicated readers. And they did sell about a million readers worldwide in 2010.
In their entire 5 year history they have sold about 4 million readers.
If their is a posterchild for a hardware-only reader vendor it is Sony. Indeed until recently most third tier readers were aspiring Sony clones.
By contrast, Nook is a new product copying the entire Kindle playbook and extending it.
B&N is going toe to toe with Amazon... in one market. They have an ebookstore second only to Kindle and they are expanding in areas like childrens' books that Amazon isn't actively targetting. They have reader apps for iOS and android, though they're not carpetbombing the tech world as Amazon is. Nonetheless in one year, one market, one product, they outsold Sony by 2.5 to 1. Sometime this summer they will exceed Sony's lifetime sales. And they may not even be the number two platform for long: Kobo is moving its platform to europe and they did a million customers in one year off a dated, minimalistic, and frankly overpriced reader and a handful of mediocre LCD readers but with a smart and opportunistic federated business model. And, of course, there is Apple with dreams of tying iPhone, iPad, iPod customers to their ebookstore. Even a fraction of those hundred million plus sales are enough to make them a powerhouse.
And, of course, there's Kindle, selling a million readers a month and seeding even more apps to go along with them.
That's four mainstream players right there, each in their own different way showing the power of platforms vs the power of hardware alone.

Standards and dirt cheap hardware might have a place in other markets but mainstream, high volume ebooks are a platform business; all that cheaper hardware can achieve is give the platform holders a bigger reach and make it easier to crush the generics.

[karunaji]

1. The main point of GSM is not economies of scale but entirely different pricing structure that was possible with phone/SIM card separation. High cellphone costs/long term contracts in countries created unnecessary barriers in the former USSR that were recovering from deep depression.

2. When I say "different people", I mean people of different cultures and countries.

You seem to equal cheap cellphones with infrequent use but you omit the importance of those calls. People who bought them may have needed them the most. Fixed line phone infrastructure in my country was not in good shape and the cell phone was often the only option available. For one who is looking for job, even the simplest cell phone provides great value. A business owner could afford more sophisticated and expensive phone but even he is getting more value from cheap phones owned by potential job seekers.

3. Amazon or Barnes & Noble are not players in the markets I was talking about. I don't know which vendors will become successful here but there are many indications that they will be local ones that will either copy the models of "global" players or base it on some commonly agreed standards (similarly to GSM).

In fact, in Latvia and Russia many other global services usually have local equivalents that are more popular than global ones. For e-mail instead of gmail/yahoo/hotmail, the local inbox.lv or mail.ru in Russia will be used. Instead of Facebook there is draugiem.lv or odnoklasniki.ru. For music or online movies instead of Netflix streaming there are local telecoms providing these services. Though Google search is also popular in Latvia but in Russia yandex.ru is still strong with 64% market share and with single advantage -- inflections of Russian language.