One of the real problems with sites like this is that they often turn into the “converted” preaching to the “converted”. So I need to let you know that I really mean the the headline to this post. The only people who understand ebooks are Amazon (and Fictionwise). Everybody else doesn’t get it.
What made me think of this was that I tried Adobe Digital Editions with my Sony 505. Who cares what the result was, the point everyone is missing is that the process sucks. Why anyone would do this is beyond me.
OK, I want to read a book. First I start my computer, then I find something called Adobe Digital Editions and download and install it. This doesn’t let me read the book, however. Next I have to find a book, then I download the book. Having fun yet? Then I have the book, but I can’t read it. I have to take it into the Adobe Digital Editions software and then move it to my Sony. Wow – how simple!
Then I want to read another book, but it’s in the Sony format. All I have to do is fire up the computer again, be sure I have downloaded the Sony Connect software, go to the Sony store and download the book and then sync it to my Sony Reader. Wow! Neat! Now I have two different programs on my computer and I have to remember which one to use for which book. We’re really having fun now.
Want to have even more fun – try to explain all this to someone who would like an ebook reader but is not a computer geek (and that’s most of the world, by the way.)
What we spend too much time on this site discussing is the technicalities of ebooks, and not the commercial realities. Hey, people read ebooks and people like things simple.
I’m a people, too, and I like things simple as well. This hit me like a fish in the face when I installed Fictionwise’s eReader on my iPhone. Want a book – go to Fictionwise on the phone and download one. It hit me again, more like a whale in the face, when a I told a colleague about a free ebook being offered by Amazon. He has a Kindle and, while I watched he fired it up and downloaded the book while standing outside in the sunshine. No computer, no USB cable, no card reader, no Sony software, no Adobe software, no Calibre software, no conversion programs, no WiFi router. He bought a book without a computer – while standing outside in the sunshine. Get it?
He did something remarkable. He wanted a book and he bought it (albeit for free). What’s that like? It’s like going to a bookstore. Wow! NOW we are having fun.
As much as I dislike DRM and all the associated crap, what I have a profound respect for is that extremely difficult thing to attain – a painless consumer experience. Apple has acheived this with iTunes and Amazon is achieving it with the Kindle.
People are always commenting to me on my Sony Reader. I am now working directly in the consumer space and I’m amazed at how many people are attracted to the machine and would like one for themselves. When they ask me what they should do – the answer is clear: get a Kindle. The consumer wants, and rightfully so, things to be simple, easy and not to require technical expertise. The Kindle encompasses all of this. One stop shopping. Hey, buying an ebook is just the same as buying a box of cereal. The fact that you may not be able to finish the cereal because someone padlocks the box is another question. That’s the question we focus too often on here. Let’s get the cereal into the kitchen first.
We can rant and rave, and we should continue to rant and rave, about DRM and eBable, but Amazon made on-line shopping a reality for consumers, and I suspect that it will be Amazon that makes ebooks a reality for the consumer as well. Kudos to them and may they be hoisted by their own petard into being forced, as Apple was, to make compromises on DRM.
The subhead on this site is “Bring the E-books Home” and, right now, Amazon is the only one who is doing it.
I’d be very surprised if the PRS 510 didn’t have wireless or even EVDO.
Although the process you describe is accurate, you miss one very important point: Amazon locks you into Amazon if you want ease of wireless and it locks you into the Sprint network, considered the worst one available (and not available everywhere). So if you are an Amazon fan, the Kindle is perfect; if you are not an Amazon fan, which I admit I’m not, the Kindle is a poor choice.
As for Fictionwise’s eReader, I have no doubt that is a good system. But, alas, it means you have to (1) be willing to read books on your cell phone, which I’m not, and (2) be willing to spend the money for an Apple iPhone and an AT&T long-term contract, which, again, I’m not.
The reality is that yes, the process can be made simpler by Sony but the current choices — Amazon Kindle and Apple iPhone — are much too narrow for my taste. And that is without discussing the ergonomics of the devices, just simplicity.
And you have begged yet another question: How much does it really matter? I currently have 152 books on my Sony that I have not yet read. That means there is a long time between having to go throught the process you describe, and when I do go through it, I handle a mass of books at one time, rather than one by one, which seems to be what you do.
Sorry, but I left off one other very important point: What will you do with your Kindle DRMed books should Amazon decide — again — to abandon the ebook market? Granted it is unlikely, but Amazon did it before. OTOH, Sony now supports ePub and ADE so even if Sony closes its bookstore, if I have bought wisely, I won’t lose much if anything.
More importatnly, in this regard is that should I decide to abandon my Sony 505, I can take those books to my next device — as long as it isn’t a Kindle.
Paul and Rich…
P: I’m delighted to see your speaking your mind, especially with good things to say about Amazon. I just wish Amazon itself would show up here, so people would have exposure to a variety of viewpoints. I love to run posts from Kindle fans and myself love the machine’s positives. But long term, they could come at a steep price.
R: Of course I’d side more with you. Stay tuned for a post speculating on what it would mean if Apple in the future shut down its DRM server for iTunes customers. Same concept applies to Amazon and other DRM fans. One detail: You can get eReader for a wide variety of machines—everything from a Vista desktop to my iPod Touch, which I use without paying any subscription fee.
Thanks,
David
The title of the article is a little misleading in that it does not differentiate Adobe DE from the Sony Reader. Paul states, in his article, that it is Adobe DE on the Sony Reader that sucks.
Now I do agree with Paul that the average consumer prefers convenience without a lot of technical complexity. Kindle may provide this, but it does come with a cost as Rich points out. And it certainly is possible for others to offer the same level of convenience that Kindle does.
Paul: I agree with you up to a point. Your friend staning out there in that sunshine? He takes a nap and the dog chews his Kindle screen. If that happened with a Sony Reader, he could at least keep reading on his PC.
But yeah, the process sucks.
Very interesting discussion.
I was in Beaver Creek, Colorado all last week and traveled through Austin and Denver airports twice, and was “offline” with I’ll say about 1,000 people in Beaver Creek all week. My wife read 4 paperback books, and I managed to read two good printed books and started a third. During this whole time I actually did see exactly ONE person reading a Kindle. He was sitting in the lobby in front of the fire at the Park Hyatt at Beaver Creek. I really wanted to talk to him, but he actually DID look like he was just sitting “reading a book”, so I left him alone.
Points I would add:
1. Until books are available on the same device that people use for phone, navigation (GPS), and music, I don’t think there will be an “explosion” to the electronic book, although if you read about Amazon’s Kindle results, they are certainly good. Garmin is trying to make a phone. Nokia bought all the rights to satellite maps for future phone versions, the iPhone made it out because iPod already paved the way.
2. Books could/should be available on a “card” today. This could simplify the access to any device part. Just put the book on a cheap chip, some nice graphics and cover blurbs on a shrinkwrapped cardboard carrier (please do not create another CD jewelbox nightmare to open) and let consumers buy these anywhere they can buy books today.
3. Digital downloads will become 90% of the book reading market. It is not a question of if, only when. Granted it has to be dead simple (downloading iTunes was never that simple in my opinion either, but the folks who got into music seemed to be a bit more techno-savvy than book readers).
jim
http://www.contentrealtime.com
So, try all that rigamarole with a Mac. First switch to Parallels or BootCamp or some other thing that will run the windows only program you cited above. I think that if Amazon ever drops the DRM keys or something else, somewhere a pirate hacker will come up with a key breaker that allows all our books to be read on the Kindle and the computer. I am surprised someone has not done that already. And please don’t tell me that two wrongs don’t make a right. Meanwhile I will avoid DRM books as much as is practicable.
Theres one problem whith that theory the emperical market data sugest it’s completely irrelevant concerns for most consumers.
The number of perfectly convenient projects who got perfect reviews generate lots og media buzz sells a few millions units and then fade into oblivion becuase someone else sells a few hundred millions of cheap inconvenient crap, it was what happened to the original apple series, the imac, and microsoft zune. and tons of other products.
You have iTunes as the posterchild but iTunes arent the only successfull music store and mp3 players were already a big business a year before the ipod was realeased so it’s probably a bit doubtfull that iTunes actually created the market for online music.
What your going to see is that just like it was with the original macs everyone who saw one wanted one for about 10 minutes and then decided to head for the store that sold IBM clones, people are going to want kindles or iphones and then in the end choose to buy subnotes or smartphones.
When your getting worked up over the prospect of amazon selling 240k kindle remember that it probably amounts to less then a weeks laptops sales at dell.
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>>>What your going to see is that just like it was with the original macs everyone who saw one wanted one for about 10 minutes and then decided to head for the store that sold IBM clones, people are going to want kindles or iphones and then in the end choose to buy subnotes or smartphones.
Fail. Apple still exists. Sales up. This is not fanboyism, just cold sales figures. I dropped Mac because I was sick of asking “Is there a Mac version of that?” Now, so much is bundled with a Mac, the question is moot for most functions.
iPhone is a smartphone.
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/quote-timothy-d-cook-of-apple/
Don’t forget Baen and Webscriptions!
I have been buying books on my phone/PDA (In the sun, and airports, and hotel lobbies etc etc) for 2+ years now since I got a web capable phone/PDA. I’ve bought from both Fictionwise and Baen, both on the fly. (And Unencrypted to boot!)
Buying the sequel to a book you just finished between flights while stuck in DFW airport standing at your gate is FANTASTIC (Buying after you have already sat down on the plane, but before it pushes back from the gate is Science Fiction made real!), and you are right… Fictionwise and Amazon have figured something out… But Jim Baen figured it out too!
This is one thing that really impressed me about the Cybook when I got my hands on it. After using multiple generations of ‘ebook readers’ with complex and proprietary, badly written sync software (or at best, using MS’s ActiveSync), it was really refreshing to plug my reader into a computer and have it show up as a USB mass storage device. Really, there is no reason to use any thing more complex than this, and you’re guaranteed it’ll work everywhere!
Downloading a new book is now simply a process of hitting ‘download’, telling it to save straight to my ebook reader, and then unplugging it and starting to read. Not quite as easy as the Kindle, I’ll grant you, but not locked into Amazon, or DRMed, and doesn’t depend on being in the US and having cellphone signal.
Certainly everyone now knows that wireless content/application downloads is simply a “must have” feature for any mobile device. But hopefully I will not only be able to read books I’ve downloaded on my digital book, but on my iPhone too, and my PC, and my TV, and my epaper scroll, and my optic implant… And I hope my choices of sources of books are myriad and diverse and not controlled by one single corporation.
A more open eco-system that can support many players at the table – like what Adobe is building – takes more time to get going for sure, but I bet we’ll see the fruits of that begin to noticeably ripen in 2009.
Amazon’s Kindle is far worse than Adobe’s Digital Editions Reader. The bland GUI of the device coupled with an equally bland PC app makes the Kindle a terrible reading experience. Don’t even get me started on its atrocious annotations feature. Try annotating a textbook with a kindle and you’ll never want to go back. Also, feel free to skirt over the issue that the Kindle PC app has no annotations feature.
1. I certainly would not want to loan a book to Str0ngWall if he would rather write in a book than read it.
2. I have over 1300 documents in my Calibre library. If I subtract the zero cost AZW files, the extreme minority of books would remain from Amazon. In the future I will not buy a device that does not support PRC and its siblings or ePub, and I really don’t care if it supports any format with DRM, they are just loaners anyway.
3. I really wanted the Sony 500 when it first emerged on the marketplace, but bought a Kindle instead because it had all the features that I wanted that the Sony did not. I do not regret that choice. I was reading a Baen book on my Palm T|X when I got the Kindle. I loaded that book onto the Kindle, searched for a rather unique word in the story I was reading and finished the book on the Kindle. I can read the majority of my books on either my Kindle or my Mac and those that have DRM if the ability to read them is lost, then I shall turn to the dark net to obtain a hack that allows me to read my books on my devices, no matter which they are, as is my right under the copyright laws of these United States.
People who want instant gratification too often find themselves enslaved by it. Kindle would be a good choice if it would support .epub, if it would allow the owner to replace a dead battery, and if it was easy to load books from other sources into it. It does none of the above. What it does do very well is make a lot of money for Amazon.
Any book worth reading is worth the two or three minutes it takes to load into my PRS505.
Maybe I don’t get it – but somehow that doesn’t bother me.
What ever happened to buying an actual soft or hard cover book. I find more pleasure in flipping through the pages of a book than fingering an Ereader.
John: Boy, are you on the wrong blog. 🙂
Bob in Oregon: I agree that the Kindle would be muchly improved if it could also read epub and have owner-replaceable batteries. But it is incredibly easy to load non-Amazon books onto the Kindle, so I don’t understand your problem there.
I have a Kindle, but also just purchased a Sony 350 Pocket. I haven’t gone into the morass that is ADE yet, but loaded a bunch of non-DRM’d books that I converted to epub using Calibre. I was delighted to find that the Sony automatically organized those books into collections based on tags I set in Calibre. I suspect that I’ll use the Sony to read non-DRM’d books loaded with Calibre, and use the Kindle for books that I want to purchase, because purchasing books through Amazon is so easy and because Amazon customer service is superb. I’m going to do everything I can to avoid having to load and use ADE.
This post hit the nail on the head. I dislike the Kindle layout & what appears to be a business model of not only selling books, but also gathering information about the book purchaser.
I love my Sony 650 ereader. As a piece of hardware, it’s a stunning device. But Sony will absolutely not win the ereader war unless 1) they figure out a way to do away with, or integrate DRM seamlessly into the ebook purchase chain, 2) they take responsibility for the DRM software, whatever it is, and they make certain it’s bug free, and 3) Come up with a better name for their ereaders, something other than PRS-650 (Sony: does anyone there do marketing?).
A word on Sony marketing: Sony’s auto-demonstration kiosks at Borders were laughable: you’d pick up the ereader and a voice would start talking, “Welcome to Sony Ereader!” or something like that. You could watch bookish introverts practically sprint to the other side to get away from the kiosk: “Aggh! It’s calling attention to me!” Brilliant marketing plan, Sony! Quite literally, hands off marketing. Might I suggest that next year, you try to market robots to the Amish!
Worse still, the Sony ereader operating system will only display “Charging” when the ereader is plugged into USB. So, when plugged into USB, none of the buttons do anything, and you can’t read any content, making the ereader look like it’s broken. Thus, at every store where the reader is on display and plugged into USB, (and they’re always plugged into USB, to keep them from dying), it looks like all the Sony ereaders on display are broken. Amazon could not have asked for a better competitor.
The Sony Reader 500 was out about a year before the Kindle. I tried to find one to look at. Borders in Coeur dÁlene in Idaho did not have any nor would they get any unless you bought one. No guarantee if you didn’t like it. The closest Borders that had one was Seattle, the other side of the mountains and a day’s drive away. It didn’t work with an Apple computer. Their free book giveaway was a bunch of books from Gutenberg, which are free anyway.
Then Amazon announced the Kindle. They would send one to you for evaluation for a full 30 days. If you didn’t want it, just send it back, they pay the postage both ways. It would accept prc, mobi, azw or txt files. I bought one. I had to wait 6 weeks because they had sold out their entire inventory in less than one day.
Amazon knows marketing and customer service. Sony does not.
Adobe Digital Editions 2.0 locks up on my computer. I have to kill it using task manager. Adobe once again is guilty of extremely shitty programming. Adobe as a company has no redeeming value. I avoid their low class products (that’s all of them) whenever possible.