Chris - 06/02/07 - The future of book consumption (update)

In this blog entry I thought I would return to one of my favourite subjects. In my blog entry in December 2005, I was talking about the new generation of e-Book reading devices that don't use backlit LCD screens but use eInk/ePaper type technology and cited the Sony's LIBRIe as the leading proponent. Well I have finally got my hands on one! My first impression is good and I will post further blog entries when I have had more time to play with it.

It's now called the Sony Reader and is being promoted on sony.com, SonyStyle and elsewhere. The device is selling well in the US where it was only launched 10 weeks ago and has still yet to be released in the Europe.

An off-shoot of Philips, iREX technologies, has also launched a dedicated e-Book device, iLiad e-reader, using similar screen technology. The Iliad is more sophisticated that the Sony - it has a touch screen and network connectivity built-in including Wi-fi but is more than double the price of the Sony (the Sony is on sale for $350 and the Iliad for 649 Euros or $810), which I think is going to seriously limit its uptake.

It almost goes without saying that there is a format war going on (as with nearly every other technology) about which is the best format for e-Books. Sony are promoting their own BBeB book format (although the Sony Reader can also read PDFs), Microsoft pushing their Reader .lit format, the Mobipocket format being popular for PDAs and of course Adobe's PDF format already being very widely recognised.

It seems to me that there is only a limited market for e-Books on PCs, PDAs and Smartphones especially for whole fiction titles, therefore the new e-Book devices (if successful) will be creating the market (like Apple did with iTunes for legal music downloads) and therefore the formats that these devices support (most likely Sony's at this stage) will be the most popular. Sony is trying to take advantage of this by closely integrating the Reader with Sony Connect again aping the phenomenally successful iPod/iTunes double act.

I have also been taking another look at Audio Books recently. They have a bit of an staid, old fashioned image but now Cassettes and CDs are being replaced with instantly downloadable digital audio files things start to become more interesting, especially when this is again coupled with the mass market penetration of MP3 players. However, once again the most successful retailer in the market Audible is trying to push their own audio format .aa which I have personally found really frustrating

I bought Next by Michael Crighton (writer of ER, Jurassic Park, Disclosure, The Andromeda Strain and many more) from Audible (which is £10 for the 6-hour version and £16 for the unabridged 12-hour version, quite good value I am sure you will agree) and listened to it on my home Media Centre PC without a problem (it even automatically added a new Audible playlist for me). Unfortunately my 1 year old Creative Zen Touch MP3 player is not supported by Audible! Therefore, to actually transfer the book to my MP3 player required downloading some freeware format conversion software and then searching for 3 hours to see how to make it work, downloading some missing .dlls, converting the .aa file, copying it to my MP3 player and then eventually being able to listen to the book on my MP3 player, four hours after I bought it... Wow, what a hassle!

I understand that copyright owners have to protect their products but this is ridiculous! The reason the Sony LIBRIe was not a success in Japan was because the DRM (Digital Rights Management) was too restrictive and this Audible example seems another case of the same to me.

However, if these issues are overcome then I can see Audio Book having a renaissance - of course I am not sure what it is going to do for the literacy of the iPOD generation!

So to end where I started - my December 2005 blog entry. In it I said a lot of Internet prediction in the mid to late 90's had not been wrong exactly - just the timescales were out; well, I found an excellent Arthur C. Clarke quote in the introduction of the Bookseller's excellent Brave New World document which looks at the issues above and more.

In the short term, we tend to overestimate technology and in the long term, we tend to underestimate technology. Arthur C. Clarke