September 4, 2010

Why no one wants an e-reader

It's been years since Amazon's Kindle was introduced in 2007, yet no one cares about e-readers. Three years after the iPod was introduced, it had taken over portable music and was already in its fourth generation. Three years after cell phones were introduced in the early 1980s, they were still too expensive to afford -- but everyone wanted one. We thought we were cool and living-in-the-future just to be able to talk on a cordless telephone outside our house. So why will e-paper never come close to replacing real paper?

First, we should consider another big failure of digital-only media / entertainment -- video games that are downloaded onto a memory stick or hard drive, rather than ones that come on a single disc or cartridge. Virtually none of the major games are gotten this way, although the technology allows it. People want a physical copy of a single game. The only somewhat popular use of "downloadable content" is to provide a few bells and whistles to a game that you already have a hard copy of.

In the biggest mistake in Sony's life as a video game maker, they changed their handheld system, called the PSP, from a system that took individual discs to one where everything is downloaded onto a memory stick (the PSP Go). This is exactly like going from a portable CD player to an iPod, yet it has done pathetically -- no one is buying it or wants to buy it.

What is the difference between recorded music on the one hand and video games and books, magazines, newspapers, etc., on the other? For iPod owners, they are listening to single tracks, not entire albums. They're flitting from one song to another (typically by different artists), rather than getting immersed in the fullness of a single album. When you play a video game, though, you don't want to play one level on this video game, then another level from another one, then a third level from yet another game, and so on -- you want to get into a single game for a decent stretch of time. The same with reading a book: you don't want to read five chapters from five separate books, but rather as far into a single book (or maybe two) as you can when you're on the metro, lounging around Starbucks, or whatever.

The main appeal of media players that can read a ton of digital files off a single small memory source is their portability -- with an iPod, there's no need to lug around 20 CDs when you only want to hear one song from each. (That means those albums stink -- only one song worth listening to? -- and that you should find better artists, but that's another topic.) In contrast to single songs, where most people want to zip from one to another across albums and artists, no one tends to bring 20 video games with them during a single session of handheld video game playing -- one or two will do fine, and they're already pretty small. Ditto for books: no one tends to bring 20 books, as just one or two or even three will do, and they're already fairly easy to carry around. Thus for video games and books, no one cares about greater portability -- the ones we carry around are already portable enough, being so few in number.

There are certainly other reasons why digital-only video games and e-books suffer, like how not having a more durable copy of something makes you more vulnerable to losing it, and gives you nothing to re-sell in the secondary market if you get bored of it or don't end up liking it. But that's true for mp3 files as well, yet most people are fine with it there. There's something different about how people experience single songs vs. video games and books, namely how immersed in a single long work you tend to get, which determines how many hard copies you tend to bring, and that makes portability worth it or not.

The one thing that could have saved e-readers from oblivion is if magazines and newspapers had only existed in print form. Articles from periodicals are like single songs -- most readers zoom across a bunch of them from a host of sources. Even those who follow just one newspaper are really reading multiple newspapers -- one unique to each day. If you wanted to recall earlier articles in print form, you'd need to hold on to all those old newspapers or magazines. Here, lack of immersion in a single copy would make portability a huge attraction.

However, newspapers and magazines screwed themselves over by putting everything on the web -- for free no less, though that's not going to last beyond next year. So, all you need now to read periodicals on the go is something with web access, such as an iPhone. That's really all that e-readers could offer, and they're much less portable than smartphones, so they have nowhere to go. The reports of ink-and-paper's death are greatly exaggerated.

15 comments:

  1. PT1---
    I think you're off-base here.
    There's a fundamental flaw in comparing books to video or music - MOST PEOPLE DON'T READ anymore.
    One in 10 Americans read just one book a year, and that includes romance novels and self-help books. Compare that with how many people listen to music, play video games, or watch television or movies.
    So, right off the bat we're dealing with less than 10% of the country who may be even a possible customer. Your blog might as well be "Why no one wants books". But if you're talking about people who DO read books, then that's a different story.
    I just bought a Kindle 3, my first e-reader. I love it. I've got many, MANY physical books, and will continue to buy them (a 26 volume set of bound periodicals are on the way to me now, in fact), but with the Kindle I have a VERY readable screen (so much better than looking at my monitor or smartphone) that will load up books that I don't own hardcopies of that are provided by Project Geutenberg, Google Books, etc.

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  2. PT2--
    I'm reading a book I found on Google Books that I had NO IDEA existed and was able to download it and start reading within minutes. It's just as portable, and moreso than most physical books, but I'm carrying a library instead of just one item. Sure, I won't read a library of books while I'm on my lunch break at work, but if I'm doing some reading for a project I'm working on, having the potential to check multiple books is amazing.
    Note-taking, highlighting!
    A month ago I bought a book used for $4.00 that was in the public domain and freely available on Google Books. For physical books I use those thin post-it tabs to mark passages I want to go back to. Not that I've finished the book, there are dozens and dozens of little neon tabs sticking out the side.
    Contrast that to the book I'm reading now on the Kindle. When I find a passage I like, I highlight it and hit enter, and it's automattically entered into a text file on the memory. When I'm done reading, I can pull that text file out and it has every single passage I wanted to reference later. For writing a blog, it's copy and paste instead of scan and ocr or transcription typing.

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  3. "First, we should consider another big failure of digital-only media / entertainment -- video games that are downloaded onto a memory stick or hard drive, rather than ones that come on a single disc or cartridge. Virtually none of the major games are gotten this way, although the technology allows it. People want a physical copy of a single game. The only somewhat popular use of "downloadable content" is to provide a few bells and whistles to a game that you already have a hard copy of."

    Your console bias is showing. Valve's Steam is massively popular on the PC front. Its hardware survey is taken to be representative of the demographic in general.

    As for why e-books haven't taken off, I suspect it's a function of both IQ and form factor. The sort of person that would want an e-book is someone who goes though an enourmous amount of information. Most people just have that sort of information processing ability. While music listening is information processing, it's passive rather than active. The second thing is that they're too small. They're much smaller than the books they're replacing, which makes them smaller. This makes them easier to carry, but it makes them harder to read, which is the point of an e-book.

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  4. There's a fundamental flaw in comparing books to video or music - MOST PEOPLE DON'T READ anymore.

    But the ones who do - like me - want a hard copy. A book remains the ideal form of information storage. If I want to read anything that's on a website (anything serious, anyway, that I have to concentrate on) then I print it out.

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  5. Tarl: "But the ones who do - like me - want a hard copy."

    Since you're responding to someone who reads books, owns lots of hardcopy books, but has enjoyed his ereader, then your generalization of your personal preference doesn't really hold.

    "A book remains the ideal form of information storage. If I want to read anything that's on a website (anything serious, anyway, that I have to concentrate on) then I print it out."

    These two don't work well together. I agree that a book is an "ideal form" for book length information.

    But then to say you just print a website out if you want to read something "serious" doesn't follow. Clearly an 8.5x11" piece of paper with a webpage printed on it isn't close to being a "book", and therefore far from being "ideal".
    It's not designed for print, nor does it have the archival quality of a finely printed book.

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  6. idk, i think you tend to push arguments too far. recently decided to order the new kindle, it's out of stock so i'm waiting for it . . . reading pdf's instead of printing out and stapling and keeping track of journal articles seemed cool, and then i realized i had bought like 10 books from amazon in the last year that wouldve been cheaper on kindle; then, storage is important--my bookshelf is crammed, and a thick book liek dawkins' "greatest show on earth," i'm not really gonna read it again, but it would be cool to be able to refer to something if i had to on the kindle rather than keep the tome lying around for years gathering dust. then there's the part about carrying books with you when you move; i guess if you're settled, it;s fine, but i'm a grad student; and finally the ability to get everything instantly rather than wait 5 days for super shipper saving or watever. also, cool features like writing notes then sending those notes to your computer etc might come n handy, i'll see. also, a minor thing, but kinda important for me, when i read in bed, a heavy book can be hard to hold up for like 2 hrs, then the light problem, so th ekindle might be good for that. for 140 bucks, i figured why not. i prob read more classic works than modern ones, and they are all free on the kindle, i believe, which is prob worth 140 right there. so i think you raise some good points why real books will prob never die, and why it's different than mp3's where players really took over, but kindles aren't going anywhere i dont think. or maybe i'll hate the thing, we'll see.

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  7. "First, we should consider another big failure of digital-only media / entertainment -- video games that are downloaded onto a memory stick or hard drive, rather than ones that come on a single disc or cartridge. Virtually none of the major games are gotten this way, although the technology allows it. People want a physical copy of a single game. The only somewhat popular use of "downloadable content" is to provide a few bells and whistles to a game that you already have a hard copy of."

    Ever heard of Steam? I don't have any hard statistics, but I believe that downloading games off of Steam is fairly popular.

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  8. PT1 is wrong. You're saying that the market for reading is smaller than some other market. Depends on the comparison. But what this post is about is what fraction of the reading market is interested in and fascinated by e-readers -- none.

    You ever been to B&N? They set up the Nook display right in front of the main doors and still everyone walks around it. You would not have seen that with a Wii display in a Toys R Us.

    Also you're weighting yourself too seriously. The rest of the reading world is not interested in this stuff, no matter how much that surprises the handful who are.

    PT2 just does more of that. Your approach is backwards -- trying to argue a theory and then warping the real world to fit it. The right way is to note what the real world is, then try to build a theory that explains it. And the real world picture is that no one cares about any of the features you mentioned, or they'd be tripping over themselves to get an e-reader.

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  9. "Your console bias is showing."

    Because that's what just about everyone plays, whether handheld or home console. The fringe does not matter.

    "The sort of person that would want an e-book is someone who goes though an enourmous amount of information."

    That's definitely wrong. The readers who go through lots of information are the type who like having stacks and shelves and libraries full of physical books. The e-reader people are not the type who want to become erudite.

    "idk, i think you tend to push arguments too far. recently decided to order the new kindle"

    Why do people take these observations personally? Face it: these things are not selling, have not sold for 3 years now. No one oohs and ahhs when they're confronted with the Nook display, and no one forms lines wrapping around the block when they become available -- like they did for iPods, iPhones, and iPads.

    That's the reality. The job is to figure out why they have failed, along with digital-only video games, whereas digital-only music has boomed. Reality drives the theory, not the theory determines reality.

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  10. agnostic - you're continually making sweeping statements about what other people want and don't want. Your anecdote about the Nook doesn't mesh with my experience because last time I was at a B&N, people were at the kiosk asking questions.
    So we have to look at statistics....

    http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm

    Amazon doesn't report actual sales numbers, but they've announced that ebooks are now outselling hardbacks, and the Kindle is the best-selling item in their store. You certainly can't say Amazon is a trivial part of the book market.

    http://www.pcworld.com/article/201470/amazons_ebook_sales_up_80_hardcovers_not_dead_yet.html

    As for a separate anecdotal story, a relative of mine is a flight attendant. She's noticed that an overwhelming percent of passengers are now using ereaders.

    Couple this with the fact that the iPad is popular for eBooks, people read on their iPhones, and there's a slew of Android based tablets arriving this holiday season. There are going to be more and better ways to read ebooks, not less. They're slowly making inroads to education as well, even though the goddamn Holder Justice Dept. sued Harvard because they had one class that used a Kindle, and Holder's JD claimed that discriminated against the blind....

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  11. The Kindle is the best-selling item at Amazon because the probability of selling any particular book is low, aside from best-selling books. So that's just an irrelevant comparison -- a Kindle to any single book.

    Rather, compare the Kindle editions overall to hard copies overall, or Kindle edition of a certain book to its hard copy sales. Almost no one buys the Kindle edition.

    I'm making sweeping claims because I know what the data say already and the pattern is clear enough from real life, such as nobody forming lines around the block for any of these things, no widespread buzz, etc., 3 years after they were introduced.

    The NPD marketing group found that most people aren't even interested in an e-reader, let alone interested enough to buy one. I don't link to that kind of report because we didn't need a study to tell us, but you can google it.

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  12. no i dont take it personal (would be retarded) though prob my fault in not being clear - my gripe was that you say e-readers "will never come close to replacing real paper" . . . how can u be so confident after 3 yrs? e-book readers have big disadvantages, but big advantages too, some of which i listed. I mean, is your mp3 analogy that perfect? i hope youre right- i'd hate to see books go the way of cd's and become almost unwanted (and minidiscs- i liked those cause they were small but you could record live stuff on them and keep them separate, etc) but habit is a powerful thing, and if you grow up used to ebook readers, i could see you (almost) seeing a real book like we see a slide rule. my father insists on using his 40 pound dictionary, for example, for the precision of definitions, but i just use the quick dictionary online. not a great analogy either but hopefully you get my point. i remember people saying digital recording will "never" replace analog in studios and all kinds of stuff liek that, and it seems that sometimes the more unique advantages the thing to be replaced has, the longer the lag is before it starts getting phased out...but it does.

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  13. "Because that's what just about everyone plays, whether handheld or home console. The fringe does not matter."

    the npg group released a market survey on gaming demographics in 2009. in contrast to your statement, the biggest gaming group is women (33.6 million). they play less than 4 hrs a week, don't own a console and they play on the pc.

    but i'm sure we both agree that these aren't the players we mean when we say "gamers."

    2nd largest segment is console gamers at 32.9 million. these are mostly males and play around 12 hrs a week.

    but here's the kicker.

    quote from article:
    "Though it does not lump them into a single category, NPD estimates that some 67.3 million Americans use the PC as their primary gaming platform. Up slightly at 25.9 million were "Online PC Gamers," a mostly female group who spent 73 percent of their eight hours of weekly game time online. The country's 17.3 million "Avid PC Gamers" were the most hardcore PC segment, playing 23 hours a week. Finally, "Offline PC Gamers," totaling 24.1 million, were the polar opposite of their online cousins, spending 82 percent of their time playing unconnected to the Internet."

    so while pc gamers aren't the largest segment, there are still plenty of them around. of the "avid pc gamers" i'd say a lot of them will have experienced steam and that their general impression of it is positive. i, for one, plan to make all my future pc game purchases online unless there are specific promotions that make physical copies more attractive.

    the main benefit of online purchases is that the games can be redownloaded onto whatever machine you're playing on with all the patches, updates, dlc etc that have come out since the game's release. since most of the games i play are online games anyways, this is a very convenient factor.

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  14. I have a sunk-cost problem with e-readers. I'd gladly get an e-reader if I could cheaply (like 10c per) convert a lot of my existing books into e-reader format. I'd gladly get rid of the physical copies of probably half my book collection if I wouldn't have to pay thousands of dollars to replace them.

    But I don't buy books at nearly the rate I did when I was in college or a few years thereafter, and many of the books I do buy aren't available in e-reader editions, so the payoff isn't there for me.

    I could convert my CDs into mp3s for very little cost, which made getting an iPod worthwhile for me. But if the process were as cumbersome as converting vinyl to mp3s, even for free, I probably wouldn't bother.

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  15. It takes most people so long to read a book anyway that there's no reason for them to go out and get an ereader which weighs a little bit more than your average paperback. And even today the few people who read are pretty sentimental about the old fashioned form.

    Some forms, it seems, are perfect. I think it was Jacques Barzun who said that the bicycle and the book are examples.

    Myself, I take notes in books and I like the ability to look back at the whole thing. That's probably the only reason I wouldn't get an ereader.

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