It’s a book, Jim, but not as we know it…
The new Reader (© Sony)
The release last week of Sony’s latest portable ebook reader brought forth the usual discussions in the press as to whether this was The One, the technology that would see our 500-year love affair with books printed on paper finally brought to an end. The consensus seems to be that we’ve not quite reached the tipping point towards mass acceptance, with issues over proprietary formats, DRM restrictions, and the cost of ebooks amongst the list of proferred reasons why this is so.
I think another more obvious reason to add to this list is a mismatch between the kinds of book available for the e-readers and the customer profile of likely early adopters. A quick survey of Waterstone’s eBook store lists 5864 titles available, of which almost 4200 are fiction (ironically, the first book about an ebook, The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy isn’t amongst them…). A mere 195 were scientific, technical or medical titles and yet it is precisely this kind of readership that the Sony and its rivals, Amazon’s Kindle and iRex’s iLiad, should be targetting.
Besides portability, the main USP of all these devices is the sheer number of titles they can store – 200 in the case of the Kindle – and it is this that makes them such appealling tools for academics and researchers across a wide range of professions. I think if I were Sony, rather than doing exclusive deals with Waterstone’s to punt Mills & Boon and the latest instalment of Jordan’s life story to the technorati, I’d be trying to sign up as many reference and academic publishers as possible to get textbooks, research papers, dissertations, standard reference works, etc. turned into ebooks asap. That way, the standalone e-reader might find a ready and willing market. If not, I suspect that the advance of converging technologies (that has already spawned an iPod Touch with an e-reader module) will overtake it and make it redundant.
