One of the mystifying things about eReaders is that the value and applicability of every single feature is disputed.
It’s understandable to an extent because different people have different priorities – However, with eReaders the arguments and counter-arguments are so intense that it’s hard to arrive at a list of core features that everyone agrees on.
If you follow the popular coverage of eReaders it will seem there is not a single eReader feature that is very valuable and undeniably critical. Let’s look at some features that are the subject of much disagreement.
The Value of eInk screens
We have an entire new category of devices (eReaders) where every single eReader uses eInk and yet there are lots of people who claim eInk is in no way better than LCDs.
The arguments against the foundational value of eInk take many forms – there is NY Times using an expert to tell us that the headaches we get from LCDs are our own fault and shouldn’t be happening, there are LCD compatibles who like to spend 8 hours a day on LCD screens at work and then come back and read for a few hours on LCDs, there are the synthesizers who’ve never seen an eInk screen and still managed to decide it’s worthless.
It’s easy to understand the objections. LCD compatibles lack the ability to empathize with us LCD incompatibles and thus consider eInk a delusion. People who own a LCD device and read on it feel eInk is a sort of elitism (perhaps in a way it is). People wedded to Apple will only be able to recognize the value of eInk when Steve Jobs releases an eInk based product.
Perhaps the biggest contributor to the disbelief in eInk is that lots of people don’t read. You take someone who reads a book a year and try to explain to him the value of eInk being almost as good as paper and he’s lost. It’s a fundamental disconnect because his inability to value reading makes him incapable of understanding eInk.
The Value of 60 second downloads
Kindle being 1st and Nook, arguably, being 2nd are amongst the best indicators that 60 second book downloads are a big deal. As is human nature and our tendency to follow the path of least resistance. We look around us at how music downloads are destroying CDs and Netflix is rising and we still pretend that the same rule doesn’t apply to books.
Sony and Sony owners don’t want to believe 60 second book downloads are worth anything. Publishers and Authors don’t want to believe 60 second book downloads and ebooks are worth anything. Reality keeps shaking them out of their delusion and they fall right back into it.
Here’s an example of how powerful the path of least resistance is -
Most people prefer to type Facebook into google and click on the 1st search result than to type in the full web address.
A lot of the most powerful search terms are simply people typing in names instead of typing out the url in the address bar.
People would rather do a search and click on that than type in www, com, and two dots. Yet, all these companies are blind to this.
It’s the same with 60 second book downloads – Publishers and Sony are blind to the painfully obvious fact that people almost always choose the path of least resistance. Even as the people in these companies marvel at how convenient products have become and how easy it is to shop online and how home delivery of groceries is an amazing thing they feel that for some magical reason that same law of convenience doesn’t apply to them.
The Value of Openness
How do we know customers care an iota about openness?
If they did care about openness Microsoft wouldn’t own PCs and Nokia and Blackberry and iPhone wouldn’t own Mobile.
There are three broad possibilities -
- People who promote openness just don’t make very good products.
- Customers don’t care about openness.
- People who promote closed systems are using voodoo to keep the better, more open products out of the top spot.
The third one is the easy one to believe -
Oh, our open systems are much better. It’s just that Microsoft and Apple have brainwashed people or forced people or used their position of power to coerce people.
However, how about considering that one of the former two might be possible. It would explain a lot - would it not?
The Openness Tax of Low Profitability
The first possibility is that Openness carries an accompanying tax i.e. the extreme difficulty in monetizing open systems. That means you can’t pour resources into improving your product and are bound to lose ground to companies that have closed systems generating lots of money. Fundamentally, openness is a strategy and it’s just as unaltruistic as a closed strategy. It’s also a strategy that ensures you don’t make as much money as a closed system unless you can reach huge scale and outnumber closed systems.
While Openness might give your company bonus points and a bit of an edge that edge is worth nothing compared to the lost revenue. The best a company could wish for is to have its competitors embrace an open strategy and take all the pretend-customers who generate no profits – in fact, they only create losses.
Do customers even care about Openness?
The second possibility is that customers just don’t care about openness. People in the tech sector value openness highly – However, it’s an amorphous subject that means nothing. How much of it is just envy of profitable companies? How much of it is just a life strategy transferred over to the Internet where it’s benefits are no longer applicable?
If you are very generous and altruistic in real life you get a lot of social benefits and it helps you in many ways. However, the Internet is anonymous and the social links just aren’t there. It’s easy for people to find an excuse to not pay you back in full.
It’s also worth noting that even if openness were a real factor it wouldn’t come into play unless your product were just as good as your competitor’s. If you’re trying to make up for a weakness with altruism you’re embracing a losing strategy.
The Value of a Common Format
Have no idea what to write here.
On the one hand you have people constantly talking about how the lack of a common format means ebooks couldn’t have progressed and what we have now is an impossibility.
On the other hand you have most readers who only think in terms of books and couldn’t care two hoots about format.
There is a lot of value in having a common format – However, it’s been linked to openness which, in my opinion, guarantees we won’t ever see a common format. The problem is that openness translates into ‘people will steal’ for most creators. So you have the opposing forces of common format = convenience and openness = stealing. It doesn’t help that a lot of the people who want a common format also want openness and the elimination of DRM.
To complicate matters we now have ebook exclusives. So, basically, we are on the verge of a royal mess.
There are two de-facto solutions emerging -
- Amazon supplying ebooks to every platform and becoming the common underlying platform as opposed to a common format. B&N are doing this too.
- ePub as a collaboration of everyone who’s lost out to Amazon. It hopes that by uniting everyone against Amazon it’ll force Amazon to join. Well, as long as Amazon has 76% market share it’s unlikely.
Neither is strong enough and we will probably be in flux for the next 10 to 20 years. A truly common and truly open format will wipe out all profits – There is no great altruistic end-solution where everyone is happy and dancing with Care Bears and Unicorns. If you don’t control and limit a resource it loses value.
It’s worth nothing that a common format only helps the 2nd, 3rd, and lower ranked players in the market. There is no reason Amazon would or should promote an open format. It would argue that it makes more sense to let the format accounting for 80% of ebooks carry on as it is.
Why fix what isn’t broken? It’s not like it’s held up ebooks so far – For all we know Amazon’s strongly controlled eco-system might be the reason eBooks have come so far and Apple’s controlled iTunes eco-system might be the reason digital music thrived (and it did when iTunes had DRM).
The Value of Being Able to do More than Just Read to Readers
This is an example of excellent psychological warfare – change the scope of what an eReader is supposed to do.
There was never any doubt about what eReaders were doing – Replacing Books, and eventually, hopefully Replacing Paper. It’s obvious from the name eReader – short for electronic book reader. They use ePaper and you read eBooks on them.
The Press and Multi-purpose device companies have managed to twist the definition into ‘a device you can read on’. It’s pretty obvious why – eReaders and eBooks are an exploding market and it’s tempting to be able to take a device built for an entirely different purpose and use it to steal part of the market.
That’s life – everyone’s trying to steal from success. However, where it get’s a little delusional is when multi-purpose companies start pretending their devices are better for reading than eReaders. Everyone knows there’s a trade-off – You get a device focused on reading and you sacrifice some non-reading related things; OR You get a device that does everything and you sacrifice some reading related things.
The illusion that you can get both is very enticing and, at the moment, patently false.
The truth is that there may be never be such thing as a device that is great for reading and also does 50 other things. Those 50 other things detract from reading, there is a higher cost involved due to the device being built to do those 50 other things, and the technology and device have to be modified to do extra things at the cost of specialization for reading.
Since eReaders are at a relatively early stage in their evolution there is an opportunity to pretend that a multi-purpose device has more value and is also better for reading. However, we’ve now hit the inflection point and survived the critical stages. From this point on it’s going to get clearer and clearer that eReaders are markedly and demonstrably better for reading than any other device.
Filed under: eBook Reader Devices Tagged: | ereader progress, ereader questions
Any single purpose device beats a multipurpose one hands down when it comes to everyday use in a controlled environment.
A dedicated top quality large kitchen knife for slicing vegetables would simply laugh to a swiss army knife’s poor attempts. Similarly, a plain old fashioned graphite pencil is the cheapest, lightest and simplest way to write editable (erasable) notes on paper, especially compared to multicolored pens.
On the other hand, the said swiss army knife is invaluable in a non-standard environment, such as a camping trip or any work outside your normal, everyday controled environment. Same goes for a multicolored pen that can replace an array of individual pens in the field (if there is a need for those).
Bottom line is this is comparing apples and oranges to begin with. Single purpose devices are unbeatable for the majority of chores – always have been, always will be. Multipurpose devices are invaluable in a minority of situations and for some exotic uses.
The only exception to this is a personal computer that replaces a large part of the earlier workspace ecosystem. But even that one is in essence only a glorified data processor, be it text, news, data etc. We still prefer to use our phone although we could use the computer’s modem, we still often use our physical calculator although a plethora of software ones are readily available, we still use our TV and our stereo although we could do all those on the computer alone.
Speaking of computers, it seems most people also prefer to use several smaller, highly specialized, pieces of software for their everyday computing needs rather than bulky software suites. The reason is simple – as a rule of thumb most of those dedicated pieces of software perform their respective jobs much better than the corresponding modules of a big software suite. And if a software suite tries to match their each respective performance, the computer resources footprint grows so large that it gets sluggish and often even unstable in performance. Again the only exception to this is when a highly integrated cooperation is needed between various tasks and the results thereof – in which case the closed ecosystem of a software suite may prove better.
To sum up it seems it’s always a question of a trade-off. You either get a streamlined, optimized and economical performance of a specialized tool or a bulky, quirky and less economical multipurpose tool. Both have their respective strengths and weaknesses.
However on top of that there is a very strange psychological effect that stems from using a multipurpose computing device. Some people, namely, seem to have an irrational urge to be able to do everything with one single device and/or from their single location. That phenomenon seems to be related in a way with the one of Internet. To my knowledge it was never felt before the advent of such a mass medium of communication.
It seems that as the Internet usage gives a person a subconscious feeling of omnipresence and omniscience there is an accompanying tendency towards omnipotence. Or in other words, using a single device to get all the needed information and using a single “window” (screen) to be able to gaze anywhere in the known universe invokes a feeling or need of a similar single device capable of fulfilling any given need centrally – a multipurpose device comes to the fore.
There is no much practical reason to strive manically after such (unneeded) multipurposeness except for this irrational urge. People will claim that such a dedicated device will increase their productivity, but it’s just a fallacy. What they really want is just a new wonderful toy to play with that would satisfy the aforementioned irrational urge for omniwhatever. Even if we could imagine a SF super device that would be thin as a sheet of paper, pliable, need no recharging ever and be able to access everything, interface with everything and display everything, one would still be left with just a glorified toy.
Conversely, any person that performs any concrete, critical work couldn’t care less about the design of their tool(s). Tiger Woods won’t care if his golf club can access the latest Project Gutenberg additions. Similarly, he will not use a single club but a whole array of them. A HImalaya climber won’t be impressed by their backpack’s ability to stream Youtube videos to their sunglasses when they’re struggling on a rock. A heart surgeon won’t be contemplating the new social widget on his mobile phone while performing a surgery etc.
To sum up, people who work want tools to do their work (better). When people do work seriously, they want to concentrate on their performance and do not want to get distracted because distraction equals poor(er) performance. That’s just the way our consciousness functions. It is not “designed” for multitasking. If a person seems to multi task, they are simply using their superior mind processing power to hop from one task to the other fast – that is not real multitasking. The real multitasking would be, similar to modern multi core computer processors, to perform various tasks literally at the same time, and that’s impossible for humans at this point. They can only concentrate on one thing at a given time, although there is a possibility to switch that focus (fast), with often controversial results. On the other hand, people who play want toys to be able to… well play. The shinier they are the better, the more distracting they are the more immersing the experience, hence better gaming.
The less (real) work one has to do, the more time one has to play. By real work a down-to-earth, often unpleasant, work is meant that keeps our wheel of life in motion. Every low level maintenance / production is like that. The more those are replaced by machines (or third world work force) the more time other people have to work on higher levels featuring (propagating) shiny icons on shiny integrated operating systems performing shiny useless tasks. As a person said, computers enable us to do much better all the things we don’t need to begin with. Ultimately this would all be a kind of entertaining play were it not performed in the shadow of a brave new world.
thanks for the comment. It makes me wonder if soon we’ll be in a world where 90% of the population choose to live in a matrix like world and only 10% actually want to live in reality.