Since Sony showed off the Reader a month or two ago, my grandfather and I have been discussing off and on the whole idea behind eBooks. After he sent me an article from the Wall Street Journal covering it, I came up with these two general ideas for what I think will probably need to happen before this market truly takes off:
1. Unless a company can come up with as nice of a solution as Apple did with the iPod and iTunes, some format is going to need to become the “standard”. As evidenced here, there are numerous different standards for publishing eBooks ranging from the common TXT, HTML, and PDF to the vendor-specific LIT (MS Reader), PRC (Mobipocket), and many others. Devices will obviously be able to handle multiple formats, but publishers will really need to trim down the offerings to only one or two (much like WMA is pretty much the DRM capable music store standard, with the notable exception of iTunes). The music stores had an interesting development in this area when the iPod became extremely popular, but Apple refused to allow others to offer AAC downloads (which prompted the PlaysForSure platform which the iPod does not support either). Ideally, a company will come out with a device and store that integrate quite nicely and will then license that format out so that other devices can read those files and other stores can provide books also.
2. With the hardware and software taken care of now, getting the consumer to buy into this idea of eBooks is the next step. I believe the way to go about doing this is for someone to get smart and make whatever deals are necessary to move to a content-based sales platform, not a format one. Amazon would be a great contender for this (and I’ve read that they’ve already been doing this with some music CDs): the idea behind it is that you can order the hardcopy of a book for the same price as usual, but along with that you can get access to a digital version (in the widely accepted format that hopefully has been established already) for maybe 2-3 extra dollars. That gets the price down low enough that anyone who wants the digital version also can have it, but it’s also not being built into the price of the paper version. Borders and Barnes and Noble could offer the same thing via their websites, but for customers who still go into the store, offer a simple membership system with kiosks set up so that after purchasing a book, someone can either hook up their device to a kiosk and download it directly or then go online and get it from there. This concept would also apply in reverse: purchasing an eBook first might cost around half that of a normal book, but then getting the paper version later on would only cost as much as to make it come out to the same price.
Is this the best way to take on the eBook market? Maybe, maybe not. It is an idea though, and once something does happen, it’ll be interesting to see how close my vision comes to the real thing.
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This post should have been made yesterday, I’ll admit that. I have experienced one of the extremely few times that to my knowledge a school has ever made a “common sense” decision. Now, what is this decision you might ask? Well, there were two baseball games scheduled for tomorrow at UTD. We have lots of doubleheaders this season, so nothing strange about that. The weather tomorrow though is supposed to have a high in the mid-30s with a Winter Storm Warning in effect starting tonight. This meant that one of two thigs was going to happen: 1) We’d all go out there and freeze in the cold for about 5-6 hours (not top on my list, but I’m used to that), or 2) The weather would end up forcing the games to be cancelled. Ah, but there’s an Option B which was actually exercised for once which was proactively moving the games to yesterday afternoon instead. Ok, you argue, so was yesterday really that much of a better option? Considering it was a nice low 80s temperature outside with a slight breeze, I’d have to go with a “yes”. 80s to 30s in less than 24 hours, now that’s the epitome of weather in Texas.
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Kinda sad that I’m just now able to make this post, but I spent a good deal of time this past weekend and today playing through the remainder of Final Fantasy VII and finally beating it. This is the first FF that I’ve ever actually beaten, although I did come close with 10 before the whole power surge incident that resulted in me getting new memory cards and therefore losing my saved games. I really want to start on 8 now, but Okage: Shadow King, Conker: Live and Reloaded, Batallion Wars, and Metroid Prime (not to mention M&L: Partners in Time) are all calling for my attention, so I should probably take care of a few of those first. If nothing else, at least it’s another game down…
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With Engadget’s post today on the Toshiba Gigabeat S, I thought I’d make a quick list of the pros and cons of it:
Pros:
*File format support including MP3, WMA, WMV, and DivX
*20 hour audio/5 hour video battery life
*320×240 QVGA screen (which is the same as the 5G iPod, but that doesn’t make sense to me because it looks like it’s widescreen…)
*Compatibility with TivoToGo
*$300/$400 30/60GB versions (again, same of 5G iPod)
Cons:
*No software as nicely integrated and with same selection as iTunes
*Previous Gigabeat models weren’t all that good
*Buttons on side apparently aren’t labeled making navigation difficult at first
Regardless, I think this is still a major contender as a replacment for my current 3G iPod as long as the reviews when it comes out don’t drastically differ from this preview in a negative way. If I don’t get this though, the two other names which immediately come to mind are the 5G iPod (of course) and the Zen Vision:M (probably not seeing as how I’m not a big fan of my dad’s Zen Micro, but I’ll do my research).
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The Ender series (or at least what I’ve read of it so far) could seriously rival HP for being my favorite book series. I finished the last book in the Bean/Shadow Quartet today (Shadow of the Giant), and it was just as good as all the others. I’ll probably pick up with the second book in the Ender Quartet (Speaker for the Dead) this weekend, but if it’s anywhere close to what these have been, it’ll definitely be a fun read.
In other news, I hate lab reports. The ones that Ms. Leediker had us do were fine because a) there weren’t that many of them, and b) we had good instructions to follow. With one every week in Physics and another every other week for Digital Systems, that’s a lot of writing. In addition, apparently no one here can write a decent lab to save their life, so even after doing the lab ut takes lots more work than necessary to be able to produce a decent writeup based on what we were given to start with.
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There’s a chance that tomorrow the ongoing war between Comcast and I will finally be resolved. Well, it’s more of a war against the modem, but they get involved since they’re the ones who gave it to me. I’m going to get a completely new type of modem, so hopefully this one won’t suffer from these lockups, and I can surf in peace for the next 3- months.
My first baseball game out here is a week from today, and it’s a really random schedule (for me) though the end of school. There’s one two week span where I have 8 games (Tuesday, Friday, and a Saturday DH each week), some weeks where I don’t have any (all away games), and then most with probably 2-3 games. So far I’m still not in love with it, but everyone seems nice enough to at least make it enjoyable. My current prediction is that I won’t be doing it next year though.
Four years ago, I pretty much couldn’t have cared less about HP sports, but now I can’t seem to stay out of somehow being involved. A week from today begins my spring break, and apparently plans are still on track for one of the head trainers (probably Coach Clark) and me to head over to the middle school one day that week in order to make a pitch to current 8th graders to become trainers. This ironically would seem to be counterintuitive to my interests (seeing as how a lack in trainers again would result in me working Freshman/JV games next year), but having only one true returning trainer (Preston) I bet I’ll work Varsity games anyway. I wish I was involved with baseball again right now (their first scrimmage is tomorrow), but I’ll settle for just randomly showing up at a few games.
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