eBooks Struggling

Wired is running an article about the struggle for acceptance that eBooks are facing.

I think this misses the real problem. I believe, simply, eBooks aren't worth purchasing. They're just a poor value. The problem stems from the fact that book people like books, I don't just mean reading the books, I mean the books them self. They collect them, put them on the shelf, lend them to friends and generally do all kinds of things with them that eBooks just can't do. This means that the value of an eBook is dramatically less then a printed book, but the prices are only slightly less. eBooks have no value beyond being read and while that should be the primary motivation behind purchasing a book, it isn't that simple.

When you buy a paper book you can read it, then you can loan it to your friends so that they can read it and then you can place it on your shelf so that everyone will know how "well read" you are. Actually with a real book you can just buy it and put it directly on the shelf and then just tell people you've read it. How do eBooks fit into this value equation? Most of them won't even allow you to loan it to your friend and looking at a file named "War and Peace.lit" just isn't the same as having the volume War and Peace sitting on your bookshelf, especially if you've actually read it.

Because of this kind of thing I have no real desire to own any eBooks. There's no thrill in collecting them, there's nothing impressive about having a large collection and you can't even let other people read them because of the DRM. Overall there's just no value and this says to me that the purchase model is flawed. In particular I'm concerned with the model for fiction or popular non-fiction, I believe different rules can apply for technical books.

I've been reading a lot of eBooks lately and I do enjoy the experience, but so far I've only paid for one non-technical book. The book is an encrypted Palm Reader file and while reading the book was fine, that book is completely useless to me now. I paid $11 for it, but now I have no desire to read it again, I can't sell it, can't give it away and can't even loan it to some one else to read. That is not a good value. Yes I got to read the book, but there's more to the value proposition then that. All the other eBooks I've read have come from various free (legal) sources, in particular the Microsoft Reader promotion. Based on my feeling about the one book I purchased, I don't plan on buying anymore. It's just not worth it.

Now however, I do believe there is an alternative that would provide good value and would be good for everyone involved. I'd like to see an eBook subscription library service that worked similar to O'Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf except for it would include general interest titles. You would subscribe to the service for a flat monthly fee of $5-10 and can then have any 5 books checked out at any one time. The files could be DRM protected downloads so that you can read them on a portable device. Since you're not buying something for long term use the DRM is acceptable. To keep things fresh you can swap the books out every two weeks or so and the publisher is reimbursed for each time the book is checked out. This way the publishers content is protected, you have a continuos source of new reading material and you don't have to waste money on "owning" something that's basically worthless after you've read it once.

Unfortunately, people tend to get stuck on the idea of owning the content, but in the case of eBooks I really don't know why you'd want to. WIth the library model you can always just checkout the book again if you want to read it again.

I don't know, maybe a service like this already exists. I know Fictionwise has something kind of like it, but it's very limited and does stupid things like artificially limiting the number of "copies" of the book that's available. That's kind of stupid, because it's just trying to apply the current physical world library model to eBooks. There's no need for it when you can have infinite copies with controlled distribution and per-checkout royalty payments.

Posted by Kimbro Staken