Interviews with Digital Media Thought Leaders
Ideal e-Book Reading Device
Podcast Audio | Posted by Phil Leigh on July 27, 2010
It’s increasingly evident that book publishing is undergoing a fundamental transformation. First, for two-and-a-half years Amazon.com pioneered the e-book market toward critical mass, largely keeping industry statistics to themselves. Second, the March iPad launch accelerated matters by initiating an irrevocable chain reaction that has only just begun. Cascading new developments seem to materialize monthly, if not faster.
For example, by unit volume June e-book sales at Amazon.com were eighty-percent greater than hard covers. Earlier this month notable authors such as Pat Conroy and Philip Roth contracted with powerful agents to publish their pre-Internet-era novels as e-books. The arrangement circumvents traditional publishers and increases author royalties. Simultaneously e-book reading devices are proliferating and prices are dropping. Visiting a typical Barnes & Noble store symbolically underscores the magnitude of change. As the leading terrestrial book chain few companies could be more dependent upon physical book sales. Nonetheless, each store now normally exhibits the Nook electronic reader prominently at the entrance.
While paper books shall remain common for years, e-books will steadily increase market share. As they do, consumers will be increasingly discriminating about e-book reader features. Given comparable weight and price they’ll prefer units that (1) utilize touch screens and (2) are Web connected. However devices lacking such features may carve out a niche by being significantly less expensive, more rugged, lighter weight, and providing longer battery life.
The touch screen is preferable because it most closely approximates the conventional reading experience. For example, iPad users advance pages merely by flicking a finger along the bottom right corner of the right page. They turn backward by doing the same on the opposite corner of the left page. Additionally, iPad books are stored in a bookshelf icon. When enabled to arrange book spines within the icon in user-chosen order, the experience simulates a personal library. In contrast, pages in Amazon’s Kindle are turned by pressing dedicated “next” and “previous” buttons. Titles are retrieved by scrolling through text listings.
Internet connectivity is important because it enables the book reader to conveniently gather applicable context. For example, if the author notes that a character is sitting under a possumwood tree the reader is not limited to the embedded dictionary for a description. Instead he can highlight the term for a Google image search and learn that the tree looks like this.
Alternately a detective story writer might describe the recollections of a character who witnessed a murder to be as confusing as “the TV images of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon.” Those of us who actually watched those steps in 1969 can relate to the simile, but younger readers may lack the context a YouTube video easily provides. Successful fiction writers know that they must avoid telling readers about a focal character’s conduct. Instead they must show it with dialog, mannerisms, expressions, and action. Internet hyperlinks can advance the principle to an even higher level.
In the future, consider how Internet connectivity combined with a touch screen may even simulate shopping in a terrestrial book store. For example, an evolved form of Apple’s iBook store may enable us to enter as avatars and search book shelves by subject, or author, or a variety of ways. Such a store could be an online multiuser domain much like an Internet connected video game. Thus, nearby avatars would represent real people with similar interests because they are searching neighboring shelves. Such a store enables us to make new acquaintances. If genuine friendship results, we can ad them to our online social networks or even meet personally.
Despite the preceding analysis, earlier this month I purchased a Kindle DX instead of an iPad. In short, Apple’s e-book experience presently falls short of the ideal paradigm and the Amazon unit was less expensive. If you would like a more complete explanation, email me.
Categories: Podcast Audio
Tags: Amazon.com, Apple, book publishing, e-book, e-books, ebook, ebooks, iPad, Kindle, Pat Conroy
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