eBook People28 April 2003 It never fails. Just when I think I have a column in the can and ready to go, I end up writing something else anyway. That's the way it went this week. I had a full column on how I think ebooks are a generational thing, and I had some highly scientific anecdotal evidence to back me up. My sister, a 26-year-old network engineer, loves reading ebooks on her iPAQ. They're just the thing to while away the hours on a long plane flight, she says. My mother, despite owning both a HandSpring Visor and an iPAQ -- both hand-me-downs from yours truly -- still reads paper books and hasn't gotten into the ebook groove yet, despite my prompting. So it seemed to me that we had a pattern here. (Of course, I know several other cases to back up each viewpoint; this column may not be much on statistical accuracy, but I'm not to going to build a trend on two data points.) But the more I think about it, the less sure I am that there's anything to this. In fact, I think age has very little to do with ebook adoption. There are two other factors that weigh much more heavily in the decison to go "e." One of these can be addressed by the ebook community to help make ebooks more widespread. The other cannot, at least not directly. The first factor is technical sophistication. Readers of this column probably have no problems going out and finding ebooks, but they're the exception rather than the rule. Ebooks may never be as easy to pick up and read as paper, but right now they're a far cry from walking into a bookstore or library, finding a title that looks interesting, opening it and beginning to read. It's maddening to find ebooks sometimes. While selection is getting better by the day, ebooks available through legitimate means still make up a small percentage of titles in print, and the proliferation of different file types means that readers will often have to have three or more reading programs installed on their devices and remember what titles were in what program. Sound too complicated for the non-geeky? You betcha! And if finding, installing and maintaining legit ebooks is complicated for "normal" people, the "pirate" scene is incomprehensible. Books are few and far between on Gnutella and Morpheus, those descendants of Napster with which Mr. and Mrs. America are kinda familiar. IRC channels and Usenet newsgroups are beyond the experience of any but the advanced Internet denizen, leaving most scanned tomes out of the reach of the masses. In order for ebooks to make inroads with the paper-reading public, several things need to happen. The industry needs to settle on one, or at most two, file formats for ebooks. This means that they'll also have to get their DRM ducks in row, or better yet, ditch DRM altogether since it ultimately doesn't work. The industry will also have to get more publishers on board (I realize this conflicts with the above as long as publishers believe DRM is necessary) and make more titles available. So far SF and Romance have been by far the dominant genres in ebooks because those are the genres that advanced Internet users read. Something of a self-fulfilling prophesy, but if the ebook market is going to grow, it needs more breadth. There are vast sections of your local Borders that are available only in print. If you release the ebooks, the readers will come. Note that word, "readers." It's the key to the second factor, the one that we can't do anything about directly. There are a lot of technologically literate folks out there that don't read ebooks. Knowing how to find ebooks is only half the equation. The other half is loving to read enough to seek out content any way you can get it. It's a funny thing. I thought I'd only be using my mom and my sister as examples in this column, but my dad is the perfect example of what I'm getting at here. He's the director of MIS for a company here in Denver, with over 30 years of telecommunications experience. He's Novell and Microsoft certified, and he doesn't read ebooks. He's never even read Between Heaven and Hell, which I'd think he'd make the effort for, given that his son wrote it. Why? Because he doesn't read paper books, either. Oh, he surfs the web with the best of them, but he never got into reading for enjoyment. Unlike my mom, my sister and me, he doesn't bliss out and get lost in a story well-told. He gets his stories from the silver screen, and his DVD collection dwarfs my own. There are a lot of people out there like my dad, more every day. It's not that they aren't literate -- although selling ebooks to illiterates would be a neat trick if you could do it -- it's that they just don't love to read. My sister and I are ebook readers because we're book readers who just happen to grok how much more convenient books can be when they're liberated from paper. My mom and my dad aren't, not because of their age, but because they either lack the technical accumen to get started with ebooks or they wouldn't spend their time reading in the first place. What can be done with this one? I wish I knew. Programs like "Reading is FUNdamental" are a good start -- get them while they're young -- but not really enough. Our culture is moving, slowly but inexorably, away from the written word and torwards multimedia storytelling. I'm not suggesting spicing up ebooks with flash animations or musical scores, but perhaps there's something we can do to convinced the unbooked that the screen of the imagination, the screen you actually watch in your mind while your eyes are reading mere words, is so much grander and more beautiful than anything Hollywood has yet dreamt up. Or maybe that's just a market authors will no longer be able to tap. I hope I'm wrong about that, but I just don't see my dad picking up the new Tom Clancy any time soon. He'll wait for the movie. Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! |