In E-Books: Try to read ’em and weep, Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam loves the Sony Reader’s screen but hates the limited selection of e-books at the Sony Reader store. Like if:book and me, he also complains of the lack of a search feature. An excerpt:
Sony’s library has 10,000 titles. Bob Woodward? Yes. Doris Kearns Goodwin? No. Dan Brown? Yes. John Grisham? No. I wanted to read the just-announced Man Booker Prize-winning novel “The Inheritance of Loss.” No dice. How about Jan Morris’s much-praised “Oxford”? Nah. I paid $3.95 for Lytton Strachey’s “The Eminent Victorians,” with its unforgettable profile of the 19th-century educator Thomas Arnold, for whom “it was disquieting to learn that Unitarianism is becoming very prevalent in Boston….
Beam concludes that the Reader is “sweet but not sweet enough.” By the way, Eminent Victorians is free at manybooks.net. Years ago, when I met I.F. Stone, the topic of a recent Open Source Radio program, he told me which biographical writings he admired. The Eminent Victorians was at or near the top of the list.
Coming later today: Waking up Steve: An E-Book-Related Short Story, by Amos Bokros, a long-time TeleRead volunteer in Florida.
A fair criticism, but considering the thing just launched this month I don’t think the selection so far is all that pale. There’s a lot of stuff FictonWise has already been selling, but that didn’t stop me from dropping around $100 on titles for the Reader I picked up yesterday.
The big problem is the authors that are still missing that I doubt will ever show up: Michael Moorcock (Eternal Champion sequence), Roger Zelazny (Amber), J K Rowling, and Tolkien would all be nice additions. I don’t think this is Sony’s fault, and I don’t think this is the publisher’s either; I suspect there may be issues with the authors or their estates.
What Sony should be pursuing, and fast, is newspapers and periodicals. There are a few mags I’d love to get on subscription. It is never a bad thing to turn a one-off sale into a recurring revenue stream, and at least for a magazine I’d be willing to pay the same as the print cover price.
Ereads, Rosetta, and Renaissance Books have really got to get their crap together though. The quality of the proof-reading on some of their titles is downright abysmal, and that lack of professionalism will deter a lot of consumers. At least the stuff coming out of the big houses is well edited and proofed.