The Future of “E” in Books
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.