Thad McIlroy - The Future of Publishing

1. Of course there are eBook websites and blogs, in this case: "Teleread: Bring the E-Books Home: News and view on e-books, publishing, libraries and releated topics" and "MobileRead."

2. An interesting sidelight is found at "A Long Bet: The Arena for Accountable Predictions." Famed editor, Jason Epstein, now one of the founders of On Demand Books, which markets the Espresso Book Machine, has bet $2,000 against Vint Cerf, famous for his work on making the Internet what it is today. The bet: "By 2010, more than 50 percent of books sold worldwide will be printed on demand at the point of sale in the form of library-quality paperbacks." Predictably, Epstein, who has a personal stake in the proposition, states that "nothing is as inexpensive, easy to carry around, and indestructible as a physical book." Cerf, perhaps equally predictably, argues that "carrying around a bunch of paper is unnecessary and despite the argument that a book doesn't need a battery or a re-charge, I believe that it will be very common for people to read for work and for pleasure with the same device(s) they use daily to do their work."

3. Wikipedia offers a list of eBook readers, those currently available, and also those demised. The list provides links to additional data on most of the readers mentioned.

4. Easily eclipsing Sony's $279 Portable Reader System, the "hot" eBook reader today is Amazon's Kindle, priced at $399. Amazon has generated an enormous amount of publicity surrounding this device (including a cover story in Newsweek, ostentatiously titled, "The Future of Reading"). While never revealing actual sales figures, Amazon was able to claim that the device sold out within a week or two of its first release last fall. Many are skeptical of Amazon's Kindle hype. An April 4^th blog on CNET by Don Reisinger, titled "Why e-book readers don't stand a chance," notes, among other issues, Amazon's failure to reveal sales numbers. "...no one is willing to say how strong sales are and so far, the tiny e-book market is still extremely small," he notes. My April 29^th blog entry, "No Snacking Between Books Please!" discusses the Kindle "controversy" in more detail.

5. I finally found an article that takes a stab at estimating how many Kindles flew out of Amazon's warehouse in 5½ hours: 4,000! I didn't expect the figure to be any higher. A May 15, 2008 blog by Henry Blodget reviews the recent claims of Kindle's "born-again" champion amongst industry analysts: CitiGroup's Mark Mahaney. Blodget reports Mahaney's claim of current sales of 10,000-30,000, while referencing Richard McRoskey's May 7, 2008 blog on Silicon Valley Insider, where he calculates, somewhat circuitously that "by our count...we're looking at least 660,000 Kindles by end of 2008. Not shabby for a $399 gadget not made by Apple." Mahaney keeps working the math, finally to announce that Kindle could add $750 million to Amazon's top line by 2010. This prompts John Paczkowski on AllThingsDigital to label Mahaney as "an honor student at (the) Strained Credibility Academy."

6. The reactions of reviewers and users do tend toward evangelical fervour, and modest disdain. A Globe & Mail review of the Sony Reader PRS-505 by Jack Kapica is typical of the tepid views of many reviewers. While expressing some enthusiasm for the design, small size and so on, he writes, "but it still doesn't supersede or even match the experience of reading a traditional book. In fact, it can be argued that technologically, the PRS 505 and all digital readers are still far behind the technology that has been stuffed into books made from paper since Gutenberg turned the crank on his press in 1454. Although Gutenberg never used semiconductors, an awful lot of very real technology has been poured into books during the half-millennium before the digital revolution."

7. Project Gutenberg
Whatever else I may think about eBooks I feel proud of the hardworking volunteers at Project Gutenberg. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, is said to have invented eBooks in 1971 (ASCII text only). Today the Project features over 25,000 free books, with 3 million eBooks downloaded each month. Despite all of my skepticism of eBooks, there's at least an audience for free ones. You can explore the project more fully here.

8. A recent publication (in book form!) called "Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age," by Jeff Gomez, has a few chapters online, including one which covers eBooks. We seem to see eye-to-eye on the subject. Among his interesting observations:

"In the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, when Martin Sheen's character is watching his fellow soldiers enjoying a Texas-style barbeque in the middle of a jungle in Vietnam, he thinks to himself, ‘The more they tried to make it just like home, the more they made everybody miss it.' The same might apply to all of the eBook devices and formats that try to simply mimic the appearance and functionality of a printed book; the more they aim to resemble print, the more people will compare it to a book. And when eBooks contain no searches or hyperlinks, as Blake Wilson points out on Slate, ‘ironically, it's significantly easier to find information in a paper book than in its digital equivalent.'"