e-Reader Zombiedom?

Kat "Clash City Rocker" Hannaford in Gizmodo has it in for e-Readers - she does a rather good fisk on their well documented major shortcomings, ie overpriced books and DRM worries:

With ebooks costing between $10 - $15, you're forced into continually feeding your Kindle/Reader/Nook/Other-warm-and-nurturing-sounding-device with cash, and as the ereaders are so physically large you also need to invest in a manbag just to avoid being mugged. Did we say mugged? We meant "laughed at." There's a reason why you don't see people using them on public transport.

Such shock that a proto punk would defend books - its a mixed up world Anyway, her argument on the death (or at least ongoing zombie status) of th e-Reader is that a combination of poor pricing and good enough other devices will see them off:

Any company that attempts to own market share in that area is fighting a losing battle. Consumers won't buy an electronic book when they can get a paperback for the same price or even less, and when they can lend it to friends, read it in the bathtub or even sell it on and make a percentage of their money back.

......

During September of this year, there were more ebooks added to Apple's App Store than there were games, according to San Francisco-based analysts Flurry. There's an obvious advantage to reading an ebook on an iPhone, as chances are you already own one. You don't have to fork out several hundred dollars on a new device that just displays lines of e-ink. iPhones are devices which serve more than one purpose, and while some ereaders allow for music playback and even gaming, you'd never buy one just to play MP3s on.

So, 3 comments and 2 predictions:

- Firstly, Kat is right with pricing - thats is the biggest impediment to it taking off in any big way. Its like "what have we learned from the CD market"

- Secondly, DRM needs to be sorted. There needs to be a trusted system that does not hand all power to the producer and can be changed at will. There have been enough cases of DRM systems going out of business or failing. We suspect there needs to be a pricing difference, with DRM'd stuff being much cheaper (ie un -DRM'd is sold on the assumption of copying)

- Thirdly, the iPhone is only a good enough today as the current crop of e-readers use old technology, but if you look at the next generation devices such as Plastic Logic's reader* there is an order of magnitude change in quality.

Now, the predictions:

- e-Readers will run alongside books, not replace them. When we did our research on the e-Reader market for Plastic Logic 2 years ago, we came to the conclusion that the major early market would be "road warriors" who would use the e-Reader to ensure they didn't need a second man bag to carry all their papers. It will be some time that they move out of this market and hit mass market price points - and even when this happens, history tells us that new technologies take some of the market away but usually co-exist

- Kat is right when she thinks that e-Readers are an interim phase - However, I think she is neglecting Moore's Law - go out 6 cycles (about 10 years) and you are looking at something two orders of magnitude cheaper and much, much lighter - it will be a commodity that we use in a semi-disposable manner, so it can be used in the bath and shower. It will also do other things, like do your singing in the shower for you. (I note that the biggest complaint when local newspapers close is the loss of the crossword, maybe that will be the killer app)

(Update - see Moore's Law vs Learning Curve discussion in Chris Edwards' comment and my replay - I used a 75% learning curve to get to 5% of the cost in 10 years)

And Kat shows a stunning lack of sensitivity to all us fusty techies when she says:

Our grandchildren won't be housing first edition ebook copies of War and Peace in an antiquated Kindle, passed down from generation to generation. There's no opportunity to get sentimental over an e-book, and when it comes to works of fiction and non, which have had thousands of man-hours injected into them, surely that's the reason people read them?

You mean I've been storing my Sinclair Spectrum in vain? (I note an interesting trend among teens to start listening to vinyl LP's again, so there's a future in the past)

* Disclosure - we worked on the early day specification of the Plastic Logic e-Reader