Recently Gizmondo published an article on what eBooks need to offer to compete with standard books that has been rebutted by Boing Boing and also discussed on Slashdot. All three links are worth reading by anyone interested in the subject, and reading them made me think about the two main kinds of eBooks that I’ve been reading and using this year—eBooks bought from eReader.com that I read on my Palm and the eBook versions of Open University textbooks in PDF format that I used as reference and for revision. In this post, I will talk about eReader.com and will cover the PDFs in a later post.
I’ve been reading works of various lengths on computer screens for years, but it wasn’t until this year that I started regularly buying and reading eBooks instead of printing out longer materials to read in hardcopy. The end of last year I upgraded my Palm IIIx to a Treo 600, and I decided to try the eReader demo to see if I would like reading on my Treo. I’d always liked the idea of eBooks in theory, but I’d been put off buying them before because of ridiculous restrictions on use, such as not being able to redownload books and reinstall them if I upgraded my computer. Also, when reading for fun, I want to be able to relax somewhere like my bed or my sofa and not be sitting at a computer desk.
eReader’s implementations of eBooks looked like it would offer solutions to both these problems. Although it does use a form of Digital Rights Management (DRM) that is tied to the user’s credit card number, the user can redownload her past purchases at any time and can even reassign them to a different credit card (though then the reassigned books must then be redownloaded and reinstalled). Also, eReader books can be read on various platforms, including my Treo 600, so I can sit and read wherever I want. On top of that, most books are reasonably priced, excluding some new releases, and they tend to be slightly cheaper than the US paperback. (With the low dollar, this means that most books are really cheap for UK residents, though this will change if the dollar goes up again.) They also have a decent selection of popular fiction and non-fiction, including a lot of genre novels, such as science fiction, fantasy and mystery.
At the moment, if I want to buy a novel, I look first to see if it’s available from eReader.com, as I’ve become very fond of the convenience of always having a book with me wherever I go. It’s especially nice if I feel like reading during my morning commute. As I live fairly close to work and have a short commute, it often doesn’t seem worth carrying a dead-tree book with me, and I also find them hard to read when I can’t get a seat on the bus, whereas I can hold the Treo more easily in one hand than a book.
It’s great for holidays as well. I read really fast, and I love to read when I’m on holiday, but I often find I run out of books too quickly when I’m away, as I haven’t packed enough to last the whole trip. With eReader, I can bring as many eBooks as I can fit on my Treo with me without having to worry about how much space it takes. The lack of physical space used by eBooks is also an advantage at home, as my bookshelves are always overflowing, no matter how many bookshelves I buy.
There are disadvantages, of course, the main one being that a PDA’s screen isn’t the best way to display graphics, so books that need many illustrations will suffer. I won’t be reading my favourite manga on my Treo any time soon. Also, the DRM system makes it harder to share books. I could in theory give out my credit card number to someone else, so he or she could unlock it as well, but for obvious reasons, I don’t really want to do that. But not being able to share a book means I’ll never lose it or have it returned completely dog-eared, with its spine and cover destroyed or pages falling out.
The most important disadvantage is that eBooks just aren’t ‘real’ books. Reading on my Treo is just not the same experience as reading a book, even though I get just as involved in a story whichever I read. In fact, I’m considering eventually buying the ‘real’ versions of some of the eBooks I’ve read, since I would like to own the object itself and not just have the rights to access a copy of the content. I know I’m not the only person who feels this way, and I can’t see eBooks replacing ‘real’ books in the future, but I can see them complementing them in certain circumstances.
