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Replying To:
A Long Wait (none / 0) (#6)
by Anonymous User on Thu Feb 19, 2004 at 04:13:06 PM PDT

It's going to be awhile before this improves.  The key issues are (1) e-books aren't books and (2) most publishers simply don't understand the technology.  A book is both data and a display medium that can last for centuries.   Books are inexpensive and easy to read, but bulky, hard to store and hard to search.  E-books are data.  They are displayed on expensive devices that have a useful life of two to four years, with disk reformats/rebuilds perhaps yearly.  E-books aren't (yet) as easy to read as regular books, but they can, if allowed, be flexibly used: changed text size, text-to-speech, read on the home computer, PDA, or tablet pc as you wish, subject to sophisticated searching, etc.  But, even not counting DRM, they are usually stored in formats that themselves will likely be obsolete in a few years.   Clearly, people that buy "throw away" novels have no reason to bother with e-books today.  People with libraries might.

Expensive E-books with DRM and in multiple proprietary formats are virtually useless for any serious reader.  Aside from destroying any obvious advantage for e-books, imagine attempting to move a library of 50 books in different formats, different format versions with different compatibility issues with different DRM systems and rules varying by publisher every year.  And that's a small library.  It is lunacy.

Sadly, even many science fiction writers don't understand the technology.  It turns out that many of them don't "get" computers as much as you might think.  So don't expect people less familiar with the technology to do better.  

To be fair, there are some legitimate issues, and I have seen valid arguments that never would have occurred to anyone (like me) outside of their business.  On the other hand, it is getting so easy to make pirate copies, given the reluctance of publishers to even produce e-books at all, people who want e-books are starting to turn to that option as the only available choice.



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