NYT on e-books: 'An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back'

(Via SlashDot) Sunday's New York Times Book Review carried an article talking about the resurgence of the e-book marketplace. Although missing several key points, such as conflicting proprietary formats, free extensive e-book collections at Project Gutenberg and Blackmask, or the debut of the $100 eBookwise-1150, it is a pretty good read. Although the Open eBook Forum was mentioned, the XML-based OpenReader Project was not. Read more at TeleRead.

I figured the digital book had failed because everyone shared my distaste for the first generation of clunky, book-sized devices designed for viewing them. ... But it turns out the e-book market has been changing course and, though still tiny, has been growing at double-digit rates. It is, in fact, the fastest-growing segment of the comparatively static publishing world. Between 2002 and 2003, the number of e-books sold rose 71 percent, according to the industry's trade association, the Open eBook Forum. ...

What made this growth possible is a phenomenon the pioneers in the electronic publishing industry didn't foresee: the explosion of cellphones and other hand-held devices with small screens capable of displaying text. About 80 percent of the downloadable books sold to individuals today are read on such devices, according to the two top online electronic retailers, eReader and Fictionwise. ...

E-books are creeping into our world in other ways. Libraries, a potentially huge market, have started to purchase e-books that patrons can download at home. Digital books are a librarian's dream come true, because they don't take up shelf space, don't wear out and are automatically returned to the library on the due date. The New York Public Library introduced its first e-book collection on Nov. 1 with 3,000 titles. ... The White Plains Public Library, which started lending e-books in mid-August, reports more than more than 200 checkouts a month. ...

Some authors fear e-book sales will cut into the sales of print copies. Others are worried that it will be easier to make pirate copies and distribute them, the way the free Internet music site Napster did before it was declared illegal by a federal court and shut down. Retailers counter that most pirating is actually done from print books, which are easy to scan quickly into a computer.

Already a culture war reminiscent of the one surrounding Napster is shaping up in the world of digital books. My college-age son is in the contingent that reads e-books almost exclusively from free Web sites because of the greater flexibility offered by their unencrypted books. Such sites usually offer plain-text format, which allows him to print as many pages as he needs, or to copy a long quotation from a book electronically and paste it into his term paper. Free sites, at least the legitimate ones, are limited to books for which the copyright has expired. Yet they are popular, especially among students assigned classic works. The University of Virginia library, which makes 1,800 titles available free from its Web site, has sent more than 8.5 million downloadable books to readers since it started the service in August 2000.

Some believe that all e-books should be free of software protection limits. Cory Doctorow, an advocate for less restrictive digital rights at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, made his first novel available free online. He argues that digital content's unique forms of adaptability -- to e-mail, computerized cut-and-paste and software translation engines -- are all areas where paper books lag. In his view, anyone who puts a software lock on an e-book is crazy. ...

The market's biggest hurdle right now may be that most people have never even seen an e-book -- at least not one with a price tag. Yet more people are reading more words from screens every day, which some would argue is equivalent to reading a digital book. ... Still, the prospect of reading an e-book on a screen can seem tiring after a workday spent in front of a computer. A reading device easier on the eyes might attract more readers. One such prospect is Sony's Librie -- a lighter, thinner reading device than the Gemstar, with resolution close to that of this newspaper and a glare-free surface that can be read at any angle, even in bright light. It is currently available only in Japan. American consumers may see a product using the new technology in the next 18 to 24 months.

Posted by Tom on December 06, 2004