What the 9/11 report says about ebooks

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Gizmodo today has a long feature about the prospects of a real ebook revolution. In the end the piece is optimistic, but only after cataloguing all the hurdles a successful ebook device would have to overcome. To me, an ebook won’t ever be completely successful until it can improve on the paper book.

As Wired News points out, the 9/11 Commission Report is not only available from the government in PDF, but has also been converted to myriad other formats by restless netizens. Within hours of its publication, the report had been “guerilla converted” into HTML, text, audio, and a more accessible PDF format. Surely folks could drop these files into their iPods, cell phones, and Palms, and be on their way. But as it turns out, dead tree is the format of choice. From the New York Times:

W. W. Norton & Company, the publisher of the authorized edition of the report, said on Monday that an estimated 350,000 copies had been sold at retailers across the country, and that all the 600,000 copies in the book’s first printing had been distributed to wholesalers and retailers.

With a second printing of 200,000 copies under way and a third being considered, Norton has essentially covered its costs and begun to record a profit on the book, W. Drake McFeely, president of W. W. Norton, said in an interview.

The iPod is successful because you do want to have your entire music collection with you at all times and be able to shuffle among songs. With books, you only really read one or two books at a time, and you don’t need your whole library with you always. The iPod and the iPod mini are improvements over the portable CD player because they take up a fraction of the space a player and a few CDs used to take. But in contrast, you don’t really want the form factor of a book to get much smaller.

If the eBook succeeds, it will do so one price and distribution advantages. The day you can buy a digital copy of a book from Amazon for a quarter of the price of a paper version, and be able to download it immediately, then and only then would ebooks begin to make sense. Even then, as with the 9/11 report, readers may want to have the real deal in their hands and on their shelves.

This post was inspired by an e-mail exchange with KJT, and for that I thank her.

Jul 28, 2004 | Comments

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