ebooks - the last two years - your opinion

[Guest]

Josh,

While I believe that Chris enthusiasm for e-books sometimes, among other things, outruns his acknowledgement of some very real practical problems facing his projected level of their acceptance, in defense of Chris, Ive never witnessed him beating down anyone who says anything remotely disparaging of e-books. On the contrary, IMHO Chris has been pretty gracious about taking criticism and pointed comments. Which leads me to hope that he will squarely address my comments in due course.

Clay

[Guest]

Originally posted by Chris Wasshuber:
Certainly I know the difference of a book and an ebook, but to call one 'real' and the other thus implicitely 'un-real' or 'not-real' is simply incorrect. They are both real.

Oh, okay. So you knew perfectly well that he was talking about a tangible, printed book, but you felt that by pretending to not understand, you had yet another opportunity to advertise the e-book's transcendent virtues, just in case someone had missed these in any of your previous posts.

I get it now. Thanks!

--Josh

[Guest]

Originally posted by Magicam:
While I believe that Chris enthusiasm for e-books sometimes, among other things, outruns his acknowledgement of some very real practical problems facing his projected level of their acceptance, in defense of Chris, Ive never witnessed him beating down anyone who says anything remotely disparaging of e-books.

Hi, Clay,

By "beating down," I didn't mean hammering with harsh or intemperate words, I mean hammering with repetition (both on the GENII forum and in other magic fora as well). No criticism of e-books may simply be left to stand, or as a "last word"; every single one is attacked or countered (although, as you point out, usually in a very polite fashion), so that the last word is always, ALWAYS one in support of e-books, often with other self-serving advertising verbage, and always, ALWAYS with a link to the business.

It's guerilla marketing, and, on one hand, I suppose admiration for tenaciousness is due. On the other hand, it's perilously close to trolling.

--Josh

[Guest]

Clay,

Google is scanning tens of thousands of pages each day. I don't think they will produce a lot in terms of magic information, but in total books scanned they will certainly reach their goals. This project takes a couple of years. A similar project has been started in Europe, mainly driven by the French National Library. They are behind in terms of actually scanning, but they are currently testing the best scanning technology and will then later start to scan.

As I have stated several years back, the transition from book to ebook is a generational change, and will therefore take about 30 years. Humans are bad at changing their behavior. How hard is it for many to change their diet and excercise habits, although they know it would be good for their health? The same is true for books. Here the example of my family. My father and mother are not comfortable with computers. They have a laptop to write a bit, but are not online, don't know what Google is and can for all practical purposes be called computer illiterate. If they look for information they consult books or ask friends. Me and my brother started computers in our early teens and a bit before that with programmable calculators. We use computers in our daily lives, we use Google and other digital information resources to search for information, but are still attached to printed information in many ways. My son who is almost 6 had for more than 2 years his own computer, which he is at times more apt at using than myself. Make no mistake, we have more children books in three languages than the school library. So we are not depriving him of the printed information. But he grows up learning to appreciate the power of digital information in a very fundamental and natural way. I think he will work mainly with digital information and will see the printed form as the last source to consult.

Or take Richard's anecdote about the production of Genii. He has changed his working habits to a primarily digital based environment. It takes a while, but once you have experienced the power of the digital information it is hard to go back.

Improvements are incremental. Banks provide digital statements rather than paper. Business information (presentations, documentation) is today in many business created, processed, read and archived electronically. End users are still printing out some of that, but again, this will slowly change. I don't print out emails. In fact I print out less and less the better I get with archiving digitally.

Also ebooks themself will become better. We still need to learn how to create great ebooks. Most ebooks today are merely what would have been printed on paper now in digital form. But they do not take advantage of the electronic medium. This will slowly change and ebooks will become nicer looking, easier to use, hyperlinked ...

On the reading device my opinion is that once a $100-$200 e-ink screen device is available we will see a clear and noticeable increase in ebook usage. It won't be a revolution so that everybody will move to ebooks, but it will be a step function measurable in terms of total market share or revenue and many more will use ebooks.

Also, where many have a misconception, selling information is not always a zero sum game. The introduction of ebooks will in many cases not necessarily cannibalize book sales, but will actually expand the market. Lowering prices, increasing availability and access naturally expands the market. Somebody in India for whom a book is too expensive, might be able to buy the digital version for half the price and no s&h costs. The publishing economies will allow more material to be published as ebooks than printed, a.s.o.

I also predict that there will be a market separation. Certain material is better printed and certain material is better kept digital. A nice photo book will for a long time be served better by a printed book. Any works of reference, textbooks, non-fiction, is probably better served in the digital domain. In the end I anticipate that the hugely favorable economics of the ebook will win out over the book. This might take two or three generations. I mentioned the following fact in some other thread here, but let me repeat it (despite the fact that some don't like repetition), because it supports what I just wrote. Scientific journals are today distributed, stored and accessed predominently digitally. 90% of all major research libraries (that are ~5000 worldwide) have digital access to science journals. 50% have exclusively digital access, and 40% a combination of digital and paper. The remaining 10% is paper only. The trend is strongly towards digital and in about 5 years it is assumed that this will be essentially 100% digital for all libraries.

It's coming, faster than you might want or believe.

Best,
Chris....
wwww.lybrary.com

[Richard Kaufman]

Here's when we'll see the change (and you can look back to both VHS players and, right now, to DVD players to validate this): when the price of the "player" (in this case, "reader") drops to a level that most people are comfortable with, you will start to sell more product. In the case of "readers," that means less than $75.

People bought VHS players because it gave them access to something they could never have before: TV and movies on demand.

People buy DVD players (as low as $30!!!) because they've been convinced that the quality is better and because the cost of the movies is the same or less than going to a movie theater.

e-book "readers" face an entirely different challenge because you have to convince people they need them. Most people simply neither need nor want them--we all have hundreds of books already. If I want to read one, I pick it up. Simple. The whole thing is going to be a very hard sell.

[Guest]

Richard - you are right. The price of the hardware required needs to drop to attract more then the early adopters and gadget freaks. However, something else will happen too - printed matter will simply go away as the price of the readers drops to nearly nothing and the quality of "print" and user experience improves to the point where most users will not notice a big difference in picking up a reader or opening a book.

It is now almost impossible to buy any form of computer software - even huge high-end corporate systems - which include hard copy manuals. Users didn't like it at first, but vendors rode rough shod over users with claims that it was easier to update PDF files than printed matter (cheaper too!)

Within a generation, you can be pretty sure that there will not be too many publishers producing printed books of ANY kind. The printed book will go the same way as the printed photograph - albeit slower!

Bob

[Guest]

While I owned a small publishing company some time back I did not involve myself with magic books because I thought the intense editorial attention necessary and potential sales numbers were too low to justify the time taken away from books that would sell multiple thousands for books that would sell in far fewer numbers.

At the time I researched the numbers the average magic book was selling 1,000 units and not always quickly. Some publishers printed editions of 500 aimed at more narrowly focused markets, sometimes going back for a second run of 500 that didnt always sell out.

As time passed, the market became saturated with product, something Jon Racherbaumer wrote about some years back. Given that the market remained more or less the same size, saturation simply meant fewer sales, given that there were always limited discretionary monies to be spent on product. That discretionary money became diluted by product and we saw, for the first time in amateur magic history, books being discounted to the buying public.

While a few titles in magic have sold more than 1,000 units, their numbers are few. A handful of titles have, I believe, sold in multiple thousands and they have done so over a long period of time. Their authors are names in amateur magicor the current flavor of the day. I know of one title that has sold around 20,000 copies, but that has been over something like a decade and the re-print runs were 2,000 at a time. There are not many titles like that and most magic books seem to have a life of around 1,000 units with maybe an additional print runs years later, if at all, witness the time it took for certain Kaufman titles to come back into print. Todd Karr still runs editions of 1,000 as does Caveney.

While eBooks allow for the option of keeping a title available forever (I wont say in print because they arent, they are available), in Chriss model, the buyer is required to pay nearly the same amount of money as a printed book to have less in hand than if he paid the additional $8 for printing and got a DVD along with the hardbound book. There doesnt seem to be any benefit to the customer in saving a mere $8.

While eBooks have the additional benefit of hypertext and implanted movies, it remains to be seen if people are willing to trade out the convenience of a printed book for the perceived benefits of hypertext and moving illustrations. I think, in many ways, were talking about apples and oranges. The fact that many/most of the worlds science journals are produced electronically merely speaks to the fact that journals provide information to their readers more efficiently in electronic form, that libraries simply do not have the room to store decades of journals that will be read occasionally or rarely, and that the majority of readers of scientific journals have access to and are comfortable with reading material on a screen. The market for science journals is a model that does not apply to magic books except in the idea of preserving and making available old magic journals.

Chris has done a marvelous job in making The Sphinx available to new generations of readers for a fraction of the price that obtaining the real magazines would cost. For less than $500 one can read information that, in printed form, would run $4-6,000 and is generally unobtainable, regardless of the price as only a handful of complete sets exist.

If ePublishers want to capitalize on the potential for eBooks, one of the things they should do, and something I believe Chris has done in many instances, is to make the price well-below what a printed and bound copy would run. This is especially attractive for old and hard to find items where the information is of primary importance, not the book as an artifact. Ive bought several things from Chris that fit into that category. I spent a small amount of money and had what I wanted almost instantly. For the researcher who wants the information, nothing is more efficient.

A couple of years ago Byron Walker gave me a tour of his library. What Byron has is the end result of the hard work of Earl Rybolt, Lloyd Jones, and himself.three men working over decades to amass a library such as can be found few, if any other place in the world. Libraries like that have always been the province of a handful of individuals with the finances and drive to accumulate such collections. However, with the digital age, Byrons may be the last of its kind as Ask Alexander looms large on the horizon.

Ask Alexander, a massive database of scanned magic books and magazines, puts a large question to the idea of individual e-books in the first place. Not now, and not in the next few years, but when the price for access to Ask Alexander drops to the point where the average magician can afford a yearly subscription possibly in one specialized area of interest like cards, coins, illusions, etc., - when the hobbyist can have access to an entire library of information that he could not possibly create in his lifetime for any amount of money that will be the time when the market for eBooks and printed books to a great degree, will be determined.

This will require a change in how we view books, not as artifacts to collect and posses, but as devices to impart information. When cheap and easy access to the material combines with easy to store and read devices that at least mimic the action of reading a book, when the hunt changes fully to a desire for information as opposed to a hunt for information AND a printed artifact, then, and only then, will digital publishing come of age.

[Guest]

Bob,

Excellent point with computer system manuals not being printed anymore. I have seen also gadget manufacturers to move away from manuals. All you get is a note to go to a website and download a PDF.

Another interesting such bit of information is that in Europe all drug descriptions (the ones you get in this tiny font with any drug you buy) must be available online so that old people can easier read them by increasing fonts or get text-to-speech access.

I think also that soon there will be no more phone books. I haven't looked into one in the US for about 3 years.

Best,
Chris....
www.lybrary.com

[Guest]

And on Chiss idea that ebooks are as real as printed books: not so.

A printed book exists in my hand, in a real and tangible way. It is accessible to me without intervening technology. An eBook exists as long as I have an electronic device to store it and access it. While the methodology for producing books has changed over the centuries from hand-set individual letters to digitally-controlled presses, the basic concept of a book printed words on paper - has not changed since Guttenbergs day because it is a system which cannot be any simpler than it is.

Ebooks are not simple and have a number of problems inherent in the product.

While books can be destroyed in a variety of ways mildew, insects, fire, flood an ebook is viable only as long as the storage and access methodology is supported by manufacturers. Electronics have a built-in obsolescence factor that the market often resolves to the detriment of the consumer.

Betamax was a better technology, but VHS became the standard. Now, a few years later, videocassettes are going the way of the Dodo; replaced by DVDs. DVDs look to be replaced shortly by Blue Ray DVDs that store more information on a disk. Analog television is being replaced with High Definition TV. These new formats require new machines to play them, thus, every few years the consumer is forced to pay to play, or watchor read. Books I bought as a child still work. I dont think that twenty or thirty years from now anyone who owns an ebook from today will be able to say the same thing.

[Guest]

Originally posted by Richard Kaufman:
e-book "readers" face an entirely different challenge because you have to convince people they need them. Most people simply neither need nor want them--we all have hundreds of books already. If I want to read one, I pick it up. Simple. The whole thing is going to be a very hard sell.

That might be true for novels, but not necessarily for non-fiction books which are largely information driven where searching and finding stuff is often at the center of interest. And that is clearly better served by an ebook than a printed one.

But for all segments, the convenience of having several books in a package the size of a book is a significant advantage. When I travel, I like to have several books with me because my mood at one time is to read a novel, at another time to read some news, later to study the latest card tricks, and next day to read a magician's biography. In paper that means lugging around a whole bag of books to satisfy my reading pleasures. With ebooks it is today a small notebook computer or even just my Palm Pilot, and hopefully in the future some e-ink reader that is lighter, sleeker and uses less power. Couple this with a lower price for the contents and you have quite a good sales proposition. I don't think it is a hard sale.

Of course, there will be always some who don't want the ebook. There are some who hate CDs and only listen to records. There are some who loath TV and only listen to radio. And there will be some who will never open an ebook. But in 20 years the majority of people will have read an ebook of some kind and many will draw pleasure, information and a great time from ebooks.

Best,
Chris....
www.lybrary.com

[Richard Kaufman]

Actually, Bob's point about software manuals doesn't apply because anyone buying that software already has a computer and monitor. And we are not talking about a computer and monitor: we are talking about ebooks that will be read on a "reader."

They are nowhere near being able to sell "readers" for $30--about the price of a normal book, and the price you can buy a low-end DVD player for. That's what it's going to take. We're decades away from that.

[Guest]

I don't think a $30 price point (the price of a book) is needed for e-books to take off. The added functionality (mobility, compactness, search, etc.) can justify paying more since you can amortize that cost over several books. Note that CD and DVD players didn't start out at $30, nor did MP3 players -- and they were big successes before dropping to anywhere near that level. I think the big issue is getting the visual quality/clarity approximating what you see on paper for a *reasonable* price. Maybe the e-ink technology will solve the display problems. If so, I think a $100 price would make a big market impact (assuming the books and other content themselves are available and ready-to-go). It's all a judgement call of course.

[Guest]

A "real" book requires no updating for accessibility. EBooks, for all of what they can bring to the reader are, for the foreseeable future, best for transitory information like computer manuals. They are also perfect for dropping the cost of college textbooks, a market that textbook publishers seem reluctant to address.

In 10 years, all the programs that have e-manuals will be obsolete and discarded so permanence is not a factor.and it should be noted that producing the manuals electronically was a corporate decision for cost-saving purposes, not something necessarily demanded by the buying public.

Books read on a Palm Pilot or other battery-operated device when taken on a plane/vacation are readable as long as you have battery power or the device isnt stolen, dropped, or has a drink spilled on it. In many cases, low tech is still the best.

[Guest]

David: the arguments you make about permanance apply to digitized music, photography, and videos too. But it hasn't stopped those from taking off. I agree that if the formats aren't standardized quickly and each vendor tries to have their own with complex DRM (digital rights management), then it will delay acceptance. But if it's just PDF, then that's universally readable and will probably remain so (just like MP3 files for music, etc.).

Batteries are a hassle, but we deal with them for phones, mp3 players, laptops, cameras, portable game players, etc. Not too much of an obstacle.

I agree that there is appeal to physical books, but the bulkiness, lack of interactive features (like search), and eventually the higher cost will tip the balance toward e-books. I think it just requires readers of good enough visual quality for a cheap enough price. Once that happens the standards and availability of content will take care of themselves.

[Guest]

Originally posted by Chris Wasshuber:
Of course, there will be always some who don't want the ebook. There are some who hate CDs and only listen to records. There are some who loath TV and only listen to radio. And there will be some who will never open an ebook. But in 20 years the majority of people will have read an ebook of some kind and many will draw pleasure, information and a great time from ebooks.

Those people will die out over the next generation - those who follow will not have the choice as printed material simply becomes obsolete. At that point, printed books will be produced only as novelties or vanity projects. This is the inevitable march of technology.

And the point about the technology for ebooks changing in such a way over the next few years as to make current ebooks unreadable in the future is not really valid - the storage technology is magnetic and optical media, and ebooks will simply be moved from one physical magnetic or optical device to another over the years (and to the next storage technology after that). As for the format (PDF, HTML, etc), as one format becomes obsolete, another will take its place and conversion utilities will ensure that our vital documents will follow us into the future.

Richard's point about technical manuals being different to other printed media also does not hold water - admittedly the technical documents were always going to be the first to go given the market for that material, but the economies and convenience of the electronic media will force all publishers to go the same way once the electronic reader technology reaches the right price point and ease-of-use level to make it accessible to everyone.

The same people who are predicting printed media will always win out over ebooks are the direct descendents of those who predicted that aeroplanes were a passing fancy and the mechanical loom would never win out over the hand version.

BTW - I prefer to read a good old printed book every time - whether it be a technical manual or a novel - I just accept the fact that my children may not have the same choice.

Bob

[Richard Kaufman]

Bob, if everyone thinks like you, then your children won't have a choice.

We will continue to see books and magazines published in hard copy as long as people demand it.

[Ian Kendall]

This reminds me of the reason television will never completely replace newspapers.

You can't swat a fly with a rolled up television.

Take care, Ian

[Guest]

Originally posted by Bob Walder:
And the point about the technology for ebooks changing in such a way over the next few years as to make current ebooks unreadable in the future is not really valid - the storage technology is magnetic and optical media, and ebooks will simply be moved from one physical magnetic or optical device to another over the years (and to the next storage technology after that). As for the format (PDF, HTML, etc), as one format becomes obsolete, another will take its place and conversion utilities will ensure that our vital documents will follow us into the future.

That is certainly what some people would like us to think, but it is a idealistic view of technology that isn't borne out by the reality of the human factor.

Conversion utilities, programmed by humans, are imperfect. Backwards compatibility, implemented by humans, is imperfect. With every new iteration of software (including the software used to read PDFs and HTML), things get left behind. The cumulative effect over many iterations is that, eventually, a great deal DOES get left behind.

Additionally, the media that we use to store our electronic information is, in many ways, more fragile than it was 10 years ago...and it gets handled by humans. A single good scratch on a CD or DVD will render your entire ebook library unreadable. Let a magnet near your hard drive, and years worth of work may be lost. CDs and DVDs can become unreadable, and you'll never know about it 'til you go to use it.

Yes, one can look at the inevitable progress of technology and see a relatively clear path. But when you take into account the fact that humans drive it, the way forward will inevitably mean that a lot of data will be lost forever.

--Josh

[Guest]

Briefly playing devils advocate and spraying to all fields

Granted, (a) digitized information is the future for information research and retrieval, and (b) each of us adults has at least a smidge o Luddite in him or her.

So, is that all there is to it? All we have to do is wait for the technology to catch up (i.e., become more palatable, more economical?) and then we can usher out printed matter? Reading is mere information retrieval and nothing more?

I noted with interest Bobs deceptively simple comment that printed matter will simply go away [when] most users will not notice a big difference in picking up a reader or opening a book. Admittedly, when that happens may be hard to predict, but lets deal with first-things-first: is anyone clear on how that will happen? Seems to me that a thoughtful discussion of the how question helps get to the core of the reading experience. And among other things, in the reading experience, books are not and have never been and will never be mere devices to impart information. Yet many blithely predict the death of printed books in the wake of advancing technology. Perhaps it will happen, but thus far nobody has cogently explained how and why it will happen in the context of the printed book reading experience.

Finally, RKs response beat me to the punch re Bobs comment on choice.

Clay

[Guest]

Originally posted by Bob Coyne:
David: the arguments you make about permanance apply to digitized music, photography, and videos too. But it hasn't stopped those from taking off. I agree that if the formats aren't standardized quickly and each vendor tries to have their own with complex DRM (digital rights management), then it will delay acceptance. But if it's just PDF, then that will probably be readable indefinitely (just like MP3 files for music, etc.).

Batteries are a hassle, but we deal with them for phones, mp3 players, laptops, cameras, portable game players, etc. Not too much of an obstacle.

I agree that there are advantages to physical books, but the bulkiness, lack of interactive features (like search), and eventually the higher cost will tip the balance toward e-books. I think it just requires readers of good enough visual quality for a cheap enough price. Once that happens the standards and availability of content will take care of itself.

Bob,

How old is Adobe Acrobat technology? A decade? Maybe a bit longer. Maybe. That's hardly sufficient criteria to decide that a format will be readable indefinitely.which is a long time. So far, only printed books fill the criteria of indefinitely.

Back in the time as Windows was taking off the end of the old DOS days friends of mine who owned a word processing business stumbled on some computer programs that had been sold at surplus by a large aerospace company here in Southern California. The programs, which cost thousands of dollars to create, were written to convert the companys word processing files from the old formats to the newer formats. My friends obtained the programs and made tens of thousands of dollars by being the only people in the area who could convert files from one word processing program to another. This was at least a year before Software Bridge and other programs became available to the general public.

When I was doing research on my bio of Gene Roddenberry I located a video of him giving a lecture in 1974, a rare record, perhaps the only one in existence. It was on 1" video tape and cost to have it transferred to VHS. Fortunately, I was able to find someone who had the equipment to do it, otherwise it would have been lost.

Then there were all those people who had CP/M machines that become boat anchors overnight when IBM decided to go with DOS....and how many computers are still running Windows 95?

In photography, I shoot digita, with Nikon D70. Jpg and Adobe PhotoShop files seem to have become standards, but for how long? No one knows. The industry will continue to supply the installed base until something newer and better comes along. Old file formats will be accessible for a time, but like everything else in the digital world, they will be phased out at some point in the future.

And it should be noted that digital photography did not really take off until digital cameras became affordable along with affordable high-end printers that produced film-like quality prints.

The point is, books, for all their bulkiness and lack of interactive features dont require time and expense to update every few years like eBooks are going to if you want to keep them.

Im not arguing against eBooks, merely trying to put them into proper perspective. They are good for some things, like instruction books and the like, but they will require re-formatting and updating if we are going to have them around for 25-50 years.

And another point: If eBooks are simply devices to convey transitory information, then they should be a lot cheaper, not simply what printed books cost minus the cost of printing as Chris suggested.

[Ian Kendall]

David,

A few of your points stood out; many of the samples you give are of new technologies that are finding their feet. In digital media, which in its current form is about ten years old, the standards were set fairly early on and have endured. PDF and JPG are likely to be around for a long time as they emerged from the maelstrom as stable and fairly open. MPEG and its varients (DivX, Xvid and other MP4 types) have become the standard for video, but all players can handle MPEG-1 out of the box.

What we have today is largely an improvement of what we had last year. A Porche is better than a Model-T Ford, but essentially it's a motorised wagon. And so it is with IT. You would be surprised by the numbers of machines running Windows 95 (I understand that until recently, much of Africa was running on Win 3.11). Under the hood there's not a lot of difference between 95, 98 and Me (although with XP and 2000 we are admittedly closer to the NT kernel). They are all, however, shiney versions of the previous - to 90% of users.

Television did not kill newspapers. VCRs did not kill cinema. Video may or may not have killed the Radio star, but anyone with a car and a bike can tell you that technology does not render all before it obsolete. E-books provide a choice in the same way I have a printed and electronic encyclopaedia.

A few years ago I put an email server into the National Library of Scotland. As well as getting to see the Guttenberg Bible and reading a first edition of Scot's Discoverie there was the realisation that manuscripts have been around for a looong time. Guttenberg made things a bit more easy for the production side of things, but the press was merely an improvement of the delivery method. Letters begat telex begat fax begat email. Most of my communication happens over the Interweb, but I still enjoy getting letters.

E-books are going to stay, and Chris should be applauded for his work. Yes, readers need to come down in price but that will happen. In the meantime I enjoy printing and reading my e-books, and searching the electronic versions when required. But I also love going to the bookshop and having a browse.

Take care, Ian

[Guest]

A clarification: I don't want it thought that I'm knocking Chris. I'm not. I agree with Ian that he should be applauded for his work. However, I don't see the ebook as replacing the printed word across the board in my lifetime. It will replace "some" portions of the printed word because in some ways digital is cheaper and stores better, but I have yet to see the problem of format change addressed.

Perhaps with Google digitizing so much material, with whatever format they are using, simply because of the bulk of material in one format, it will become THE standard for fifty years...although I hasten to point out that fifty years, given the speed that technology develops, is a very long time.

[Guest]

Regarding standards changing and becoming obsolete, that's partly a matter (as Ian Kendall points out) of relatively early standards finding their way toward mass acceptance. Once things stabilize they tend to stay around a long time and change in upwardly compatible ways.

But aside from that, the larger point isn't whether or not standards will change or whether that's a good thing or not. It's whether any of that will prevent e-books from becoming a market success. In that respect, I don't think it will be a problem market-wise as long as the formats are perceived as being *relatively* standard and permanent (like MP3 or JPEG etc). Millions and millions of people buy digital cameras etc knowing that they depend on file formats that theoretically might change and will require backup etc (all the problem associated with digital media). But that's a minor issue to most people relative to the value and flexibility they get. So if ebook readers reach the right level of value for the money, I don't think the issue of digital standards will get in their way either.

[Guest]

A few points for me to address:

1) I can convert a WordPerfect file to a Word doc then further to HTML and further to PDF, back from PDF to HTML and Word and to simple ASCII text if I so desire. Formats are largely interchangable. Yes, not all of the formatting translates smoothly, but the information is hardly lost and in many cases even formatting is preserved nicely. I don't see any major problems with format changes in the future. That was different in the early days of computing - not anymore.

2) The enjoyment of reading comes largely from what you read - the contents. The fact that it is a book, a magazine, an ebook read on a laptop or a hand-held device or a story told to you in person is secondary. The fascination of a story does not lie in the format it is delivered in. It is the story itself, or the information you receive. That means the fundamental reason why you buy a book or magazine does not change going to digital formats.

3) Some of you should read books by Clayton Christensen, the famous Harvard Professor who is studying innovation and how it plays out for decades. His most famous book "The Innovators Dilemma" is a good start. He describes with some examples how ground breaking innovations have played out in the past and the same patterns repeat itself. I think ebooks will prove to be yet another such case. Take for example the transistor radio. In the beginning the crappy transistor radios from Sony were considered inferior and the established radio producers laughed and denounced Sony and the transistor radio similar to how some of you talk about ebooks and the technology behind it. And to be fair, transistor radios were bad in the beginning. However, they found a nitch and over time Sony improved the radio step by step, incremental improvement by incremental improvement, until there was little difference between the sound quality of a transistor radio and one built from tubes. Today, pretty much all radios are built from transistors. Case closed.

The point I am trying to make here is that, yes, one can find many flaws with ebooks. However, perfection is not necessary to draw great benefits from buying them. You can save money. You might find information that is not available otherwise (Artanis Bottom Deal comes to mind - the ebook costs you $35, the record and booklet will be unavailable for most of you), you can search and make better use of the information you buy, you can take it with you, a.s.o. And over time ebooks and their readers will get better. I can see it in the ebooks we produce. They have on average become better and higher quality. Same with readers. My Palm III is no comparison to the e-ink readers available today and in 5 years down the road we will have even better ones. Not with a big bang, but with small incremental improvements on many fronts. And before you know it, the information you are seeking will only be available electronically.

Best,
Chris....
www.lybrary.com

[Richard Kaufman]

People buy digital cameras because they no longer have to buy film and pay for it to be developed; because they can see each photo the instant it's taken and delete the junk they don't want; because the cameras take astonishingly good photos--I have a small Cannon I just bought and it can take an almost professional looking photo under almost any circumstance while on automatic.
People buy digital cameras because they transform the adverage idiot into a photographer.
Digital cameras have nothing to do with eBooks.
DVDs have nothing to do with eBooks.
Computers have nothing to do with eBooks.

[Guest]

Just to put the timeline into perspective, I can recall my father telling me that he was on a team called to the Pentagon about 30 years ago, with the mission of developing a way for everyone to have books electronically. It involved a reader concept as well. That was at least 30 years ago he was going for those meetings (which I didn't find out about until a couple of years ago).

Chris says we're 20 years from it being the standard. So, 30 years ago, I know they were working on it, added to 20 more years, that's 50 years to develop it. Seems like a long time to me. Didn't we put a man on the moon in less than 10 years? :) Hard to believe designing and building a space craft to take people to the moon and bring them home safely is easier than converting books to e-books ;)

There's a lesson in there somewhere.

I personally own a few e-books myself. I find I almost never read the entire books I have in e-books, but what I do read and find most appealing are what I'd call manuscripts or single tricks, like some of Mike Close's products. I have no issues reading a 10 or 15 page e-document with video clips, but I just can't enjoy sitting down reading entire books on my computer at this point. Love the search functions, just hate reading off of monitors for long periods of time. Perhaps if I had a $800 monitor and a $400 chair, it'd be more comfortable to do for me.

Steve

[Guest]

At the level of particulars, ebooks are obviously different than digital cameras. But we don't have to be that literal, do we? At a more general level many of the same factors are at play: easier production, distribution and manipulation of content, cost reduction and quality improvement due to technology advances, space saving and portability, interactive features, etc. Exactly how these play out will differ from one media to another, but to say there's no similarity is ignoring this larger point.

[Guest]

For many readers the cost advantage is significant and is a driving force behind the acceptance of ebooks. For example, just the mailing of a book to Australia can sometimes be as expensive as the book itself.

For many being able to save a few bucks can mean the difference between purchase and no purchase. People in emerging economies like Brazil, India and China do not have the disposable income like many of us enjoy in the US. But even for the ones that can afford to buy lots of magic, think about saving about 30% including s&h on all your book purchases. For me, that would be quite a bit of money.

Best,
Chris....
www.lybrary.com

[Guest]

Fascinating discussion!

Perhaps some of you are right and our children WILL still have the choice, but I fear that they will make it, and it is perhaps our grandchildren who miss out on the printed word.

I confess to having no idea when or exactly how all this will happen, and I also confess to having something akin to "blind faith" that technology will win out in the end. To make it happen:

1. Electronic readers have to improve in quality

2. Readers have to improve on ease of use (i.e. it has to be as simple to operate as picking up a real book and opening at the page with the turned down corner - it also has to work in all lighting conditions, induce no more eye fatigue than reading a printed book, and have battery life of weeks rather than hours)

3. Readers have to come down in price to the point where we are not too upset when we leave one on the train, we just go buy another

4. eBook prices must come down to below the level of the printed equivalent (i.e. not just excluding things like shipping and handling)

5. Publishers will need to start producing electronic versions of everything they currently print. Richard may resist that for as long as he can, but it has to come.

Blind faith, maybe - but based on how we look back now with nostalgia at products, industries and sometimes entire communities that were wiped out seemingly overnight (but actually over a generation or two) by new technology in some form or another, I do believe it will go that way

Once the reader improvements arrive, who would not be seduced by the opportunity to take their entire magic library on vacation with them, along with all the latest best sellers, without having to pack a suitcase full of books? It is not about the quantity of reading material as such (one can only read so many books in your two weeks vacation) but the ability to make the choice of what you want to read once you are on the beach. I for one will jump at the chance.

Bob

[Guest]

Originally posted by Bob Walder:
5. Publishers will need to start producing electronic versions of everything they currently print. Richard may resist that for as long as he can, but it has to come.

Bob, I would add that the authors themselves should carefully look into the ebook option and then make an informed decision. The traditional print publishers are not the best source of information, because they obviously have to defend their business and are often misinformed about the realities and opportunites of digital publishing.

Here are a few advantages I see for authors if they go the digital route:

1) More design and formatting options to present the contents in the best possible way. This includes for example the size of the ebook, hyperlinking and the inclusion of multimedia.

2) Faster turn around. After the manuscript has been written and edited, the time to print, bind and distribute can take months, at which point a competitive product with similar content could beat you to the punch. With an ebook the time to publication is a lot shorter. That also means that you get much sooner royalties (see 3)

3) Higher total long term profits. E-Publishers, like my Lybrary.com are able to pay significantly higher royalties than a print publisher. That has largely to do with risk and investment costs. Couple this with a direct sales model, where authors receive royalties on the retail price rather than on the distributor price. Typically this means 3-5x higher author royalties per sold copy. I have cases where this goes as high as 10x. It is true that an ebook will initially not sell as much as a book everything else being equal, but long term the odds are very good that an author will make a lot more with an ebook than with a book.
After the initial book print run has been sold there is no further income for the author from the book. A reprint is often not possible, because the rest demand is too low to justify a new printing. In the case of the ebook, royalty income continues for a long time, and all rest demand, even a single copy can be fulfilled efficiently, contributing to the author royalties earned.

4) Ebooks are easy to update and at the same time, never have to go 'out of print'. No book is without error and often an author would like to add to or correct what he wrote. Take for example Card College vol 1. and vol. 2. Roberto Giobbi added about 15 pages to each volume for the ebook compared to the latest printing. That is significant. With a book one needs to create a new edition, which is costly, takes time and might be hard to sell - so it rarely happens. Ebooks can be updated very easily and all past customers can download the new edition possibly free of charge.

Best,
Chris....
www.lybrary.com

[Guest]

This discussion got me interested in looking at e-ink readers to see just how good they are, and if I'd purchase one now.

I live in a town of 350,000 people, half a million in the surrounding area.

I went everywhere in town that might stock such an item.
Not only weren't they not in stock in a single one of the stores, none of the salespeople had a clue what I was talking about.

This may represent the real first hurdle to be overcome.

[Guest]

As far as I know all readers who use e-ink screens can currently only be bought online. My suspicion is that the e-ink screen modules are not yet produced in such great quantities. This also explains why the prices are still very high.

Best,
Chris....
www.lybrary.com

[Guest]

Consumer Reports just released their assessment of the e-ink Sony Reader ($350). Among other things, they mention:

There is NO search feature
It accepts memory cards, giving it (virtually) unlimited memory
Does not work with Macs
Blackish text on grayish background, with contrast "similar to an aging paperback"
Text large enough for the visually impaired
Each page holds a lot less text than a book (for instance, Bob Woodward's State of Denial is 576 pages printed, and 1,264 pages on the reader (at the SMALLEST type size).
Comes loaded with a few classics
Also accepts plain text files and Word documents (including the 19,000 free out-of-copyright books at www.gutenberg.org)
Can play unencrypted MP3 and AAC files
Can show JPG photos in grainy shades of gray
Turning pages - easy
Turning on and off, changing volume, controlling pointer - not so easy
Sony claims 7,500 page turns per battery charge, though the battery ran low after far fewer pages.

--Josh

[Guest]

I just read a review of the Sony PRS-500 in Jan/Feb issue of Technology Review. It says that these readers can be bought for $350 in some Border stores as well as at electronic dealers. A few points from the review:

- screen resolution 170dpi (LCD screens range from 90dpi to 120dpi) a clear improvement in screen resolution.

- contrast ratio 8:1 which is on par with newsprint but not as good as black ink on a bright white paper.

- battery life: The reviewer wrote he used it for 20 hours and there was no dent in the battery indicator. So he believes Sony's spec of 7500 page turns on one charge.

- can display PDFs and Word docs.

Biggest critique was the high prices Sony charges for the ebooks. The prices are just a tad lower than the paper versions at Amazon. The review also repeated the rumor that Amazon itself was working on an ebook reading device. I guess we will see a few more e-ink based readers, which should push prices low and make for richer features.

Best,
Chris....
www.lybrary.com

[Guest]

What I'm surprised at is that no manufacturer has tried the King Gillette approach to an ebook reader....sell the device for next to nothing and then sell the books for a reasonable price.

The latest reader is $350, which is only slightly cheaper than the first reader I remember, the Rocket EBook Pad, originally offered at $400. Maybe the manufacturers think $350 is "next to nothing."

I still think the real market for ebooks is college textbooks. A student could buy his entire courses's texts on an ebook reader for a lot less than he has to pay for textbooks today if the textbook publishers had any imagination. The savings for the publishers not having to put out millions in printing costs would, I think, easily fund the conversion.

The media could be proprietary to one reader and having to download the texts would eliminate the entire used book market, requiring each student to pay to use the text semester or class. The downloads would not be transferable, but each download would be cheap since the cost of printing, shipping, and storage would be eliminated and the costs of publishing would be recovered faster.

[Dave Egleston]

It doesn't matter what anyone says - Until a person can take an ebook to the beach, porch, car, sun room or any well lit venue and see the screen - it ain't gonna work.

I just got a new cell phone and the idiots that manufactured the phone decided to put the user/technical manual on a cd. After making a call to the manufacturer, I was informed by the customer service rep that they were receiving "an inordinate amount of complaints about the electronic manual" and are in the process of printing out a booklet.

Chris is doing an admirable job with his company but he really has to lighten up as far as the shortcomings of ebooks, I hate them but I'm willing to admit how handy they are when using them to do research or for a starting point when troubleshooting an xray machine for repair. Schematics don't translate very well on a monitor nor do step by step setup procedures when the repairman is required to walk from point to point around a room.

I don't know anyone who will sit down and read WAR AND PEACE from a screen, which is sort of the point of pleasure reading which is sort of the point of magic books for the majority of us.

Dave

[Guest]

David, e-ink technology has to be considered a very recent development, although the idea and first prototypes are about a decade old. This means every end equipment manufacturer like Sony is paying a lot for these screen modules. If you look at the price of the former Rocket-ebook at ebookwise.com, it is around $100 and I have seen them offer it for $90 with a certain committment of ebook purchases.

That means that e-ink devices should come down to about the same price, because all the rest of the electronic is the same (or could be the same). And I think that this will happen in the next 3 years by which we will have half a dozen of e-ink readers on the market.

At $100 a reader makes perfect sense for many as long as ebooks are quite a bit cheaper than the paper variety.

The biggest challenge of textbooks is the combination of insufficient DRM technology and underfunded students. Students are the one group of people who have the least willingness to pay for textbooks. That is why you see a lot of piracy in that segment. So either the e-textbooks are so cheap that the incentive to pirate is low, or DRM is so good that piracy is very hard to achieve.

Many good ideas of big publishers have failed in this market.

Best,
Chris....
www.lybrary.com

[Guest]

Originally posted by Chris Wasshuber:
- screen resolution 170dpi (LCD screens range from 90dpi to 120dpi) a clear improvement in screen resolution.

- contrast ratio 8:1 which is on par with newsprint but not as good as black ink on a bright white paper.

170dpi may be an improvement, but still seems very low for a product that is supposed to replace the printed book. Where does eye strain fit into all of this? No refresh rate was discussed, but isn't that also a factor in considering eye strain?

Clay

[Guest]

Dave, I would challenge your assessment that most magic books are read like novels. There are two main differences which make ebooks a lot more useful to magic than to novels.

1) A novel you read once. A magic book you want to get back to, to find a move description or a trick description that at a later point in time becomes interesting to you. So the search function is a very important feature, because you want to locate those routines and moves you have read 5 or 10 or 30 years ago.

2) When you study a new routine you do more than just read it like a novel. The first reading might be similar to reading a novel. But the further readings to study the routine are very different. You have to study the illustrations (or embedded video clips). You have props in your hand and follow along the description. You try it out and go back to the description again, a.s.o. And to study a routine ebooks can be quite a big help. For example, you can use text-to-speech and listen to the instructions while you follow along with your deck of cards (no reading, no page turning and other sometimes impossible tasks while you are engaged with the props). You could print out just this one routine to have with you anywhere you go, rather than the whole book. You can quickly reference other ebooks in your e-library to find alternative move descriptions or related tricks, a.s.o.

Of course, that might not be how you study routines. Maybe you only need to read them once and you are done. Maybe you do not need to refer to other material. But for me personally, I have found to learn more efficiently using digital technology than regular books. It is a richer set of information, better linked together, searchable and browsable in less time than I can do with books.

Best,
Chris....
www.lybrary.com

[Guest]

Originally posted by Magicam:
170dpi may be an improvement, but still seems very low for a product that is supposed to replace the printed book. Where does eye strain fit into all of this? No refresh rate was discussed, but isn't that also a factor in considering eye strain?

Clay,
Going from typically 100dpi to 170dpi in screen technology is huge. Print out something in 100dpi and then 170dpi and you will immediately see the huge difference. No, it is not 300dpi which is your garden variety laser print output. And it is not 1200dpi or even 2400dpi of the high gloss magazines and photo books. But I would expect it to be comparable to newsprint where contrast and edge definition isn't that great either.

And should the e-ink screens be successful and find their niche, you will see the resolution and the contrast creep up. These are incremental improvements which will happen over time as one manufacturer tries to outdo the other. 300dpi screens of various kind are already in the production labs.

Eye strain is a very subjective problem. I sit infront of a computer screen most of my waking time, and I have done so since my early teens. I only feel eye strain after two days and nights in a row infront of the screen without sleep. Otherwise I have never felt eye strain. Maybe this comes with age, maybe I am just blessed with a certain screen compatibility. I don't know.

Best,
Chris....
www.lybrary.com