Does anyone remember the Timex 1000, Commodore's VIC-20, C-64, or C-128, Texas Instruments' TI-99 series, the Atari 400 or 800, or the Apple-II series?
They were all highly proprietary pre-IBM-PC computers in the late seventies and early eighties that sold for as much as $600 at the time. Today they're laughingly called 'antiques' or 'doorstops' or 'boat anchors'.
You still see them now and then at garage sales and flea markets, often complete with their 300 baud modems and single-side, 360k floppy drives, but most of them have found their way to a dumpster.
One of my friends, who cut his computer-teeth on a Commodore-64, had a plexiglass cover made and proudly displays his 'antique' computer, complete with external floppy drive and printer, mounted on his office wall.
(He says it should still work...)
Then, about 1983, along came the 4.77 Megahertz IBM PC, after which came the PC/XT, PC/AT, and the x86 stuff, and the Pentiums.
With the XT series, color screens became available, and even - gasp! - HUGE, three megabyte hard drives costing less than $2000 each! Glory be!
Hard drives, as we know, became cheaper while becoming larger inside and smaller outside. Color screens became sharper and cheaper, laptops appeared, and the computers themselves became ever faster...
...And it only took almost two decades of various corporations nickel-and-diming us to death over every tiny increase in speed, memory, or overall computing power to bring us to our current state of affairs.
* End of reminiscences *
I brought all that history up to illustrate a point, so I'll go ahead and get to it now:
Softbook. Glassbook. Rocket eBook (now known as
Gemstar's REB 1100 & REB 1200)
Pick any brand of highly-proprietary ebook hardware or choose from any of the available "reader software" schemes.
Chances are that none of them, at their best, will be any more than stepping-stones to the better, smaller, faster, and cheaper products of the future.
My favorite ebook reader is a Toshiba 1555CDS laptop. It goes where I go and it handles a multitude of tasks for me, including scheduling, databases & spreadsheets, word processing, emailing, and surfing the Internet.
When I'm called upon to create a web site, I can go to the client's home or office, take digital pictures and feed them into the Tosh, build the pages, display and edit the results, and then FTP the files to the server while the client writes the check.
When I find myself with a few minutes to spare, I can pull up an ebook that I've downloaded from baen.com (science fiction) and read something by a well-known author like David Weber, unless I feel the need to edit one of my own ebooks or write something like this article, which was first drafted during a lunch at a local restaurant.
The idea of spending $300 or more for a device that will only be able to perform one task, such as reading proprietarily-formatted ebooks and articles, or even one that can perform a few tasks, such as scheduling, messaging, and calculations, is not very appealing to me, especially since they will likely very deliberately be rendered obsolete within a year or two by their own manufacturers.
Ebooks and the Internet have taken the printed word into another realm, one very similar to audio books and music, but the big-money guys seem not to have realized yet that the profit will be in the content, not the hardware.
Any tape or CD player can handle an audio book. Any tape or CD player can also handle a music recording. Extremely portable tape or CD players can be bought for as little as $20 to $50. How does this compare to an asking price of $300 for an ebook reading device?
Sure, some of the ebook readers plan to display words, pictures, and maybe sound.
Big thrill. That sounds a lot like a TV/VCR combo I saw recently that sells for around $100. The only difference is the recording medium; a VCR tape versus memory or disk.
In all fairness, that TV/VCR unit weighed a little over seven pounds, but the real difference is available content; it would display any movie I'd care to rent and a fairly vast multitude of broadcast TV shows on dozens of channels.
According to various sources, over half the homes in the US have computers. Since laptops have been selling for as little as $1000 for the last few years, and since used, refurbished, warrantied laptops now cost as little as $250, I'd think they're becoming fairly common, too. (No, I don't sell them. Search on the Net.)
Doesn't it seem a bit more sensible to make ebooks that will display well on existing hardware and reach out to a much larger, ready-to-read audience?
What about copyright protection, publisher's rights, and all that other stuff?
Well, who is going to steal something that anyone can read for free?
Here's a big, fat hint, all you paper publishers who want to produce e-literature:
Do it like the TV and radio people do; let advertisers pay for everything.
Charge the reader nothing! (or very little)
Here's another big, fat hint... Don't use pop-up, interruption-style ads.
Ads don't really make people buy. They make people remember the product name. A colorful, imaginative banner ad at the top of a page can do that job.
A box that pops up and breaks the reader's involvement with the story will likely just piss him or her off and make that reader avoid the product altogether.
Reading isn't like watching a TV movie or a sitcom. The reader's mind is actually working at entertaining itself. A TV watcher's mind is usually on a kind of autopilot, having to do no more than wait for more brain candy between commercials.
A viable, profitable method of publishing ebooks exists. All any publisher has to do is copy the "publishing" system used by the broadcasting industry.
There will be those who will bitch and moan about "commercials" and such and swear that they'd never read an ebook published under such a system. No biggie. The same noises were made by hardback-lovers when paperbacks appeared and when movie makers felt threatened in the early days of television.
Indexes to my other articles and ebooks
may be found on my website:
Abintra Press!
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