How to popularize e-books? Lynn Dimick, a 43-year-old network manager in Westminster, CA, is worth listening to–read his essay below. This man has spent real cash on 130 e-books from Palm Digital and at one time or another has owned ten handhelds, all but one of them Palms. He is married to a junior high school teacher and is father of five children, some of whom are reading e-books.
To help schools and libraries see the value and potential demand for e-books, you must first create the demand. How can we do this? The same way that any producer creates demand–advertise. One of the functions of advertising is to educate people. If the general public does not know that e-books exist, and that many people now own a device that can read e-books, then the demand won’t increase. When the public demand for e-books increases, the libraries will start to see more users asking about e-books and the demand for e-books in libraries will increase.
Stephen King caught the vision of e-books’ potential when he released Riding the Bullet as an e-book only. But where was the advertising? Right now much of the e-book industry is fueled by word of mouth. Word of mouth is very cost-effective and can be wildly successful. But it only benefits a few suppliers and has very little penetration into many consumer groups. We need the big publishers, such as Random House, to actively push e-books as a viable format to traditional pulp. Can you imagine the impact that an ad in People magazine with Oprah advertising Palm Digital Media or Amazon as a source for her book of the month?
The hurdle is the perception that there is less value in an e-book because the price is the same, in many cases, as a hard-bound book. Education will overcome some of this objection. I introduced some people in my office to e-books when I was able to share with them the general plot and my review of a forthcoming pulp book that was pre-released in e-book format.
The final hurdle, I believe, is educating the authors and the publishers that e-books are not wildly pirated on the Internet. Almost all of the e-books that are traded on the Internet are as a result of the text being scanned in and not the Digital Rights Management being hacked.
One additional idea is to find a way to train youngsters to read e-books. The challenge here is the cost of a handheld device. Perhaps a non-profit foundation could be established that will accept old handheld devices, refurbish them, and give them to schools for this purpose. Right now the classes that would benefit the most from this are literature classes. The schools would need to be educated on the cost savings associated with e-books, particularly with public domain literature.
Thoughts: Yoo-hoo, Peter Olson? The above is a real live customer speaking. Random House titles almost surely are among the 130 e-books that Lynn Dimick has bought. Needless to say, his remarks should also be of interest to Palm Digital, which, I’d hope, will try harder to steer publishers away from oppressive DRM schemes. Please note I don’t necessarily agree with all of what Lynn writes–I myself believe that lower prices are far more important a potential solution than educating people to live with high prices. Still, as buyer of 130 e-books, he is entitled to speak up! Especially I like his comments on the potential of used handhelds and public domain e-books for the public schools. I’ve made similar suggestions to a volunteer with a Friends of the Library group. Reminder: TeleRead welcomes contributions from readers, especially if they’re as heartfelt as Lynn’s. – David Rothman
