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Why We Aren’t All Reading E-Books
By Richard Nantel | June 27, 2007
Stephen Downes, in commenting about my last post about e-books, mentioned that he’s skeptical that e-books will take off:
“…like online music, what will make eBooks popular is not the e but the free. Establish the free market first. Only then can you even think of charging for (some) content.”
I agree that the growth of a free market would drive the creation of a commercial market. But, there’s another major hurdle standing in the way of e-books gaining wide adoption: the lack of inexpensive, easy-to-use e-book authoring tools.
In recent months, a new, non proprietary file format for e-books has hit the publishing world. OEBPS Container Format (OCF) is XML-based and provides significant benefits over Adobe Acrobat and other commonly used formats. E-books published in OCF adjust their content to best display on different devices. At a recent conference event, an Adobe rep was referring to documents in this format as “liquid paper” to describe their adaptability.
To see what this new format looks like, install the plugin (3 MB), and sample some of the e-books Adobe and other publishers are making available for free. Here’s what this format and player look like:
There’s much to love about this new file format. For one, it manages all your e-books, sort of iTunes-like, allowing you to easily switch between reading one e-book and another. (Wouldn’t it be cool to have all the learning materials related to a subject accessible through one easy interface?)
If you’d like to produce a document in this format, it appears you have two options:
- Purchase Adobe InDesign, a desktop publishing application ($699). This is the only commercial desktop application I’ve found so far that publishes to OEBPS Container Format.
- Create the XML files manually using a text editor and create the container file using WinZip. (Non-geeks, beware.)
Podcasts became ubiquitous because cheap (often free) tools became available that enabled anyone with a microphone to publish audio files. For e-books to catch on, basement publishers will need access to similar tools. Until then, we won’t be seeing e-books as a popular format for learning content or anything else.
June 27th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
I am one of the founders for Bookyards, a small but free online library at htp://www.bookyards.com We have been online since 2001 - 2002, so I believe I can add a certain historical perspective to this discussion.
When we first started this library our intent was to simply convert public domain books for internet use. Being a Canadian based site with different and more lenient copyright rules, we felt that we would be able to offer content that U.S. based online libraries cannot.
Our expectation was to never have a large amount of traffic, nor position ourselves for commercial gain.
But this has changed in the past 3 - 5 years, and for the following reasons:
(1) There are many more free online libraries than what existed 5 years ago (about 20 libraries six years ago). Today….Bookyards has a list of over 800 which are listed at http://www.bookyards.com/categories.html?type=links&category_id=1522
(2) When newspapers first went online, many readers had trouble adjusting from the real thing……myself included. Today, I read scores of online newspapers and I just do not have the time nor inclination to browse through a paper one. Habits change and the newspaper business is now seeing that. Books will be the same.
(3) Content. In 2001 there were only a few books that were freely available on the web. Today ….. I have no idea and I am in the business. Michael Hart from Project Gutenberg mentions millions.
(4) Bestsellers and modern copyrighted books are now becoming freely available on the net, openly flaunting copyright laws. My blog discusses these issues at the following links:
http://bookyards.blogspot.com/2007/05/effects-of-rapidshare-and-megaupload-on.html
http://bookyards.blogspot.com/2007/06/new-harry-potter-book-why-buy-it-when.html
To give you an example of some of these libraries, their sites are located at the following:
http://www.burgomeister.org/
http://vivien23.uw.hu/
http://www.greylib.align.ru/listlang.php?lang=1
http://nprp-bookworm.blogspot.com/
I can fill your whole comments section with over 100 sites. This is no surprise …… the cost of copying a book and having it put on the internet now runs to about $20 - $30 per. Something that was unheard of three years ago.
And while their traffic stats are still low….I am already receiving a considerable amount of interest, alarm, and concern over these developing trends.
As for traffic stats over the past 5 - 7 years, they also show exponential growth. Sites such as Project Gutenberg, Online Books Page, Internet Archive, etc. are now always in the million plus range per day. A situation that can and will increase as better technologies and copyright issues are resolved.
June 27th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Victor: Many thanks for this. I suspect the reps from the publishing firms such as Random House and HarperCollins I’ve been speaking to are aware of the growth in e-books you describe. This explains why they are all moving aggressively into this area.
June 27th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Just to respond to the comments, I think there is a very big difference between eBooks and books that are online.
Most books that are online are plain text (as in the Gutenberg collection) or RTF (as are most of the Burgomeister books). These are, of course, free and open access books (whether legal or not).
What these types of books manifestly don’t need is a ‘reader’. They show up just fine in web browsers, and can even be stored and viewed on MP3 players (eg. Samsung or iPod).
The other types of books online are the scans. This is typically what you would see on sites like megaupload and rapidshare. We are told “All that anyone has to do is go to Google, and type http://www.rapidshare.com ….the search result will tell you where this file is located to be download” but what you get when you do that is what you get when you search for MP3s - a huge pile of spam sites.
But this leads me to my main point. Mostly, there’s no reason to share scans or awkward file formats, like PDFs. Formats that are designed for reading on paper are notoriously harder to read on the web.
Look at the Adobe Max sample, in the image above. Only about a fifth of the screen is devoted to actual text. Were that displayed on my screen (a very nice MacBook Pro, no cheap display) the text would be about 5 point in size, almost impossible to read. Sure, you can magnify it - but at the cost of having lines that extend off the screen to the left or right.
Online, text needs to flow into the available space. This is something PDF and related file formats (not to mention scans) simply don’t do. This means you must have very large screens or learn to live with shifting your ‘page’ up and down, back and forth, a lot.
Text in plain text, RTF and HTML, by contrast, flows into the display window. Narrow the window, and the lines narrow. If there is overflow, it is always at the bottom of the page, allowing a nice smooth scroll (or occasional PgDn buttons).
Above, i read, “For one, it manages all your e-books, sort of iTunes-like, allowing you to easily switch between reading one e-book and another. (Wouldn’t it be cool to have all the learning materials related to a subject accessible through one easy interface?)”
I already have that. It’s called the web. I access it using Firefox. I don’t even need to store the files if I don’t want to (if I want to, I can - and there are numerous content management systems that allow me to manage my text files, or I could simply use the Windows or Mac operating system, which is designed for precisely that).
What we are seeing online is not an increase in the popularity of eBooks per se. We are seeing an increased abundance of free and open content. This is something very different from what the publishers envision.
Book publishers would *like* readers to use an iTunes-like system - proprietary interface, non-portable content formats, no free or noncommercial content. It’s not going to happen, except in some very captive markets. And even in these markets (university and government libraries, for example) the questions are being asked. Why are we paying for this?
This should be noted: “the cost of copying a book and having it put on the internet now runs to about $20 - $30 per.” That’s not per copy per reader. That’s per book. Which makes the per reader cost about 10 cents.
From where I sit, the future of books - properly so-called - online lies not with eBooks, which do badly what HTML does very well, but rather specialty sites like Lulu.com
The book - properly so-called - will *remain* a print publication, with the bulk of the expense (and the price) being for the paper, ink, binding and distribution. They will be printed for paper libraries (which are still a very convenient place to store information, especially if you have a searchable text version of each printed book), keepsakes and souvenirs.
June 28th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
just responding to the comments:
I would like to thank both Richard Nantel and Stephen Downes for their insights on this topic. I have posted further comments on my blog at http://bookyards.blogspot.com/2007/06/why-we-arent-all-reading-e-books.html
June 28th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
Stephen:
Thanks for taking the time to respond to this. A couple of points:
We should speak about format. “E-book” is a term used to describe many things:
* Scanned images of pages from a printed book
* Adobe Acrobat conversions of Word and other documents
* Audio books
* HTML files
* Etc.
A real e-book format should provide a minimum list of features:
* A certain faithfulness to the design and typography. (Books are more than just the words.)
* A user friendly display on multiple delivery platforms, especially those with smaller screens
An ability to copy and paste text to other applications
* An ability to bookmark
* Ability to search
* Ability to print
Consequently, I don’t consider scanned images of pages from a printed book and audio books to be e-books. I also don’t consider HTML pages as e-books unless they have been designed to display appropriately on small screens. (Attempting to surf the Web using my Palm TX PDA is pure frustration. Few web sites provide content that can be displayed correctly on a PDA. For the most part, the Web is hard-coded into a resolution of 1024 x 768.)
Consequently, I applaud and welcome the new OCF format.
About the screen capture in my post, there’s more to the Adobe reader than is displayed. The display can be full page and, like conventional HTML, the text can scroll to adjust to the size of the window. It’s a big improvement over PDF, scanned pages, etc.
One of the main advantages I see in the new OCF file format is that it is XML. (Ahh… if all the Web were tagged in XML, what a wonderful world it would be. All information would be tagged to describe its meaning, not simply marked up to control its display in a browser.)
About the ability to manage multiple books, yes, the Web allows people to bookmark materials. But, the point of an e-book is often to access electronic documents off-line. Even online, providing technology that organizes information has much appeal. iTunes has gained wide acceptance because it provides a way for people to see and manage all their music, podcasts, videos, etc. In a world where almost everyone suffers from information overload, software that organizes information is appreciated.