I’m going to make some predictions based on what I’ve seen happening this week in the eBook market. As with any kind of forecast, I probably have a 50-50 chance of being wrong. But guessing about the future, particularly in the fast-paced realm of technology, is my kind of fun.
First of all, how do you write ebook? or is that ebook? Newspapers like the NY Times use the hyphen, and fashion violators don’t. I bet on fashion rule breakers because, well, they’re the rule makers of tomorrow (which is next week).
The event that most of all warmed me up to the pre-Christmas e-reader hype (hyphen here for readability?) was an ad I saw on TV just two nights ago for the Sony Reader. Now, this device has been on the market for a couple of years. It was one of the first of its kind, predating Amazon’s Kindle. But Sony’s strategy apparently was to promote it primarily to academics and librarians first, running print ads in some of the snobbiest of magazines. I complained on my blog, even back then, that Sony was preaching to the choir and wasting time by not directly addressing consumers. I wanted to see an ad campaign with a glitzy techno counterpart of jumping dancer silhouettes wearing white headphones.
And he was puzzled that Apple seemed to be deliberately ignoring that market. In fact, I was horrified when Steve Jobs reportedly commented that kids don’t read anymore, so there’s no point in launching a reader. I was hoping this was clever disinformation, as much as I dislike the use of disinformation in any form, for any reason. (You can read eBooks on an iPhone using various third-party apps. I don’t think that’s a core strategy for Apple though.)
So I did some digging into the Sony ad data and found that people reported seeing it last month (August 2009) in some regional markets. I live in the Los Angeles area and have never seen it. But this limited exposure from last month seems like a test of marketing to me. I bet now, after Labor Day and before the holidays, you’ll see that ad a lot, all over the major networks, broadcast and cable, and across the country.
Personally, I think the ad sucks, as it shows a panel of experts (some/all of the actors), who are promoting the thing. One claims to be the speed reading champion of the world, and I bet he actually is. But the spinning silhouettes of pop icons are not. Once again, Sony is casting to the geeks. (I consider myself a geek, so don’t think I’m putting my peers down. It’s just that we’re not the majority or all of the population in the US would have had Medicare years ago.)
Add to this development the related evidence that Philips iRex is now launching in a venture with Best Buy and Verizon, as reported yesterday in the The New York City Times. The iRex reads the open source EPUB format. Sony recently announced that Reader would soon support that format as well, along with its proprietary LRF and Adobe PDF formats. One big difference is that EPUB books generally lack the digital rights management (DRM) electronic copy restrictions imposed by LRF, Amazon Kindle, and some versions of Adobe PDF.
For my part, I decided to join the club and strengthened my membership and presence in the eBook distribution service Smashwords.com, which supports EPUB and LRF, as well as many other formats. I think a big consideration for eBook buyers should be the long-term cost of purchasing content. E-book prices vary widely, but many versions of the Amazon Kindle advertise for less than $10. Many EPUB versions of Smashwords range from free to a dollar or two, though best sellers often cost more. In addition, there is the public domain library that offers project gutenberg, where everything is free and is about a hundred years old. But if you’re looking for Charles Dickens instead of Dan Brown, you can find him and thousands of other famous authors in EPUB, HTML, and “plain text” formats.
It seems that the Sony Reader Pocket Edition has the lowest price among its competitors, but it lacks wireless connectivity. Maybe that’s not a big deal and the price is the crucial factor. Other Sony Reader models, as well as the Kindle and iRex, have built-in wireless (service included), which I guess is the main reason for the price difference.
This will all change, probably by the time you click the Submit button to publish this article.
And what about Apple? Can we expect an announcement one day? I’m betting on a plug-in tablet-sized screen as an accessory to existing iPods. Years ago, I saw a “leaked” YouTube slideshow on such a device, as if it had been prepared for a briefing by Apple’s development team. Whether the video clip was fake or not, the concept makes perfect sense, both technically and commercially. The iPhone is a useful reader, but I wouldn’t read a novel on it.
And I also thought that Amazon’s strategy of introducing the larger-format Kindle 3 into the college textbook model was a brilliant move, in a niche market you’d think Sony would have owned by then.
I don’t know if it means anything, but I can’t find that leaked Apple video on YouTube anymore…