RicDay on Publishing

A year ago, I thought e-readers were the future of books. Now I think not. Too much is wrong with e-readers for the product to survive without radical changes.

What is wrong?

Dedicated e-readers (think Kindle, Sony, Nook) are expensive, kludgy devices with features that are way too limited to be truly useful. Yes, you can read a novel on one of these devices and the experience is fine. But that is about where it all starts and ends. The Sony "sort of" allows margin notes; none displays images in a resolution any better than a hobbyist photo from the 19th century; you can totally forget about visually rich content; and live links to content on the Internet don't exist.

What is needed?

• Open, standardized formats. Epub is the logical choice.
• Untethered devices: Kindle has wifi, but only to Amazon's store. I want choice in where and how I shop.
• Color. Color e-ink may emerge in 2010, but given the high prices of monochrome e-ink displays I doubt it will result in a low-price e-reader.
• Connectivity. If e-readers are not truly web-enabled devices, I predict that the education publishing market will move to devices that are.
• Mass-market prices. Even $200 (half what I paid for my Sony in 2009) is too much for a one-trick device in the consumer market, and a serious obstacle to widespread consumer adoption.

What should happen?

Apple’s vaporous iTablet (essentially an iPod Touch with a 10-inch screen), is pretty close to what I think would be the ideal device. Except if it does ever appear, it will probably be priced around the $1,000 mark and that is way too high.

I expect we will see a mini flood of touch-enabled tablet computers in 2010. Asian manufacturers, aware of the buzz surrounding the supposed Apple product, will look to get into the market quickly, at price points designed to compete with netbook computers — somewhere under $500 in most instances. Resellers like Dell will introduce a line of them and others will follow.

The younger generation, in particular, is comfortable with touch. The iPhone and similar devices have paved the way. A 10-inch or 12-inch touchscreen computing device with wifi connectivity (and an ethernet port), could be the only computer a student needs for school. Give the device decent screen resolution, audio and video capability, a fast USB port for an outboard hard drive or DVD recorder, and decent battery life, and I think you will have a winner. Would you rather pay, say, $500 for that device, or $200 to $400 for a dedicated e-reader?

Add non-proprietary software to read ePub format documents, a software keyboard for margin notes, the ability to store those notes in the cloud so you can access them anywhere, anytime, and you have a device which education publishers and educators could get behind in a big way.

Nonfiction publishers would find a device such as this a lot more attractive, as it would open up new business models. Cookbook publishers are being challenged for consumer attention by the written and video instructions on food websites. They could easily respond with digital cookbooks linked to streaming videos, and experiment with subscription models as well as advertising-supported models (think of a book on baking breads with an embedded discount offer from a maker of stand mixers).

Will all this happen? Maybe. I hope it does. The e-reader market and publishers deserve something a lot better than we currently have.