Have you seen anyone reading an e-book?
I am not a Luddite, far from it. I have a Blackberry (whatever did I do before?), a shiny new iPod (although after loading my entire CD collection I still have 145GB of memory left), a MacBook pro, two other big Macs, various back up devices, a digital camera, a Humax FreeSat box – the sort of modern paraphernalia that a chap cannot do without. I haven’t got an iPhone yet because I’d rather have something that delivers my emails not that I can use as a light sabre, but I can’t wait to see an iPad.
But I cannot get e-books. Many years ago when I joined the Independent Publishers Guild (no apostrophe, but what can you do?) the chairman came up to me and got very excited about e-books. I said, from a position of total ignorance, that they would never take off. Four years later he told me I was right. Now I’m not so sure.
There was a letter in the Guardian the other day from a pensioner saying that she couldn’t do without her Amazon Kindle, how nifty it was and how she didn’t have to lug around a great parcel of books when she went anywhere. The cynic in me thought it might have been written by Amazon but I imagine the Guardian checked.
I’ve seen what a Sony E-reader looks like – very nice and sleek and desirable – but only in Waterstone’s hanging up ready to be bought and I’ve not seen Amazon’s Kindle and that’s the point.
I’ve never seen anybody reading either, not on a train or a bus or anywhere. Not even on TV.
Yet logic says people must be buying them and downloading e-books.
My only experience with this is signing up for a firm that wanted to sell our books as e-books only to be let down.
Yet in a throwaway society e-books are bound to take a considerable percentage of the market in time, although the fact that there are only two dedicated devices on which to read e-books – the iPad can do many other exciting things as well although the lady in the Guardian thought it was going to be too bulky (it must have been written by someone at Amazon) – tells its own story. I’m sure though that this will change although I think there are certain safeguards that need to be put in place.
First, somehow, the seller of the e-book ought to be separated from the seller of the device that displays them. Fine for Waterstone’s to sell Sony readers but not fine for Amazon to be both seller of Kindles and what goes on them.
I am wary of giving Amazon even more control. In many ways they bully the book trade and with e-books it appears they go one step further. Apparently they can sell you an e-book and then remove it from your Kindle without your permission. I assume that when you buy an e-book from them that you are signing up for this but surely this will be tested in the courts.
The upshot of all this is that SportsBooks will be doing something about the lack of e-book facilities we offer. No, we are not bringing out our own e-reader but watch this space.
April 21st, 2010 at 4:28 pm
i have read an e-book but on a laptop not on an ipad, kindle or generic e-reader. Frustrating not having a physical manifestation of what you have purchased but as it was a Dan Brown not such a bad thing. I would buy more especially for holiday reading, including sports books!
May 15th, 2010 at 10:53 pm
I personally prefer reading real(physical books) instead of e-book version. The E-book market is cool, but it still have a long way to go. Thanks.