
What’s the Matter with Ebooks? - lermontov
http://www.dancohen.org/2015/03/24/whats-the-matter-with-ebooks/
======
transfire
Being a "I can't wait for" enthusiast of eBooks before they existed, when they
finally arrived I must sadly report they "aren't ready yet". There are two
major issues that prevent eBooks from supplanting paper books.

1\. The design of devices on which to read eBooks are far too bulky, non-
ergonomic and expensive. Until 13" tablets are ultra-light weight, malleable,
full color, and have extra long battery life, at a reasonable price, the
medium will play second-fiddle to the comfort of a real book.

2\. eBook ownership is confusing and tied to particular companies which exert
authoritative control over one's library. Having to recollect the particular
app to open to find a particular book sucks. But worse, the horror stories of
cancelled accounts and subsequent loss of all purchased books will keep any
thinking person away from anything more than cursory purchases.

Fix these two problems and the eBook deluge will really begin. Until then I
wouldn't even be surprised to see a drop in sales.

~~~
bryanlarsen
13"? E-book readers should be smaller, not larger. A phone size e-book reader
would be perfect for fiction. It would be crazy lightweight, you could read
all day without having to rest your arm to hold your book.

The size is also perfect for reading: your eye can focus on several entire
lines simultaneously without any eye scan.

I have several nice e-readers, but I always read on my phone because the size
is much more comfortable. That forces me to sit up so I can rest my arm in my
lap.

In the dark an OLED screen will always be superior to e-paper due to the lack
of a backlight.

~~~
kruk
I use Kindle Voyage and the reading experience in the dark is superior to that
of iPhone 6. The screen is lit but it doesn't shine in your face, so you can
read comfortably for a prolonged period of time.

I still read a lot on the phone because it's always available but with 3G
enabled Kindle you can freely switch between the two devices and always pick
up where you left off no matter what device you're using.

I somewhat still prefer reading paper books but I do majority of my reading on
Kindle. It's always available, it can hold thousands of books and if there is
a book you want to read chances are you can get it on your device within
minutes.

------
quanticle
Especially for non-fiction, ebooks are lacking the "flippability" (for lack of
a better term) that print books have. The slow response time of e-ink, IMHO is
a big factor in that. I was trying to read David Graeber's _Debt: The First
5000 Years_ on my Kindle, and I eventually caved in and got the print book
because the Kindle version frustrated me when I tried to flip back to review
earlier points in the books.

I would posit that this is why e-books are still far behind print when it
comes to textbooks. Even Millenials prefer print textbooks, even as they adopt
e-books for other purposes.

~~~
yawz
On the other hand, "search" is much more advanced in e-books. Taking notes,
bookmarks, etc. It's just that e-paper/e-ink isn't as responsive as tablets.
It'll come, though. It's only a matter of time.

------
acabal
Some in this thread have already mentioned platform lock-in/DRM, which is a
huge issue, the elephant in the room really. But the other huge issue I
encounter very often is the absolute garbage typography and formatting of even
commercial-grade ebooks.

For example, of the ebooks I've read, 80% of them that were sourced from books
that were in print before the ebook era are clearly slap-dash OCR jobs that
never even got a proofread from a frazzled intern. Even modern books, those
published this year or recently, are subject to this sort of mistreatment,
though at a lower rate. King's _Dark Tower_ series is a great example of this:
when I bought the ebooks from Amazon a few years ago, they were filled with
spelling errors, mis-curled quotation marks, errant or missing hyphens, broken
paragraphs, and so on. And I paid nearly the same price as a print version!

Even if an ebook isn't an awful OCR hackjob, publishers seem to insist on
dragging our collective decade of experience writing web pages and the
HTML5-based epub3 spec through the mud. An ebook is, at its core, nothing more
than a handful of HTML pages and some metadata. Ebook readers, at their core,
are web browsers. Yet commercial ebook developers insist on using outrageously
bad markup that confuses a device's simple mind, awful custom styling that
stomps a device's sane defaults, and markup that's only compatible with one or
two platforms. (Amazon is partly to blame for this, because their stubborn and
idiotic insistence on the god-awful mobi format instead of the open and sane
epub format means many producers have to trust automated tools to convert
between the two.)

Free ebooks aren't excused from this either; books from Project Gutenberg are
also hit-or-miss in quality, mostly miss. (Though that may be because many of
their ebooks were produced before ereaders and modern standards were even a
thing!)

All of that together makes ereading a distinctly sub-par experience compared
to the beauty that centuries of typographical knowledge produces in print
books.

I'm working on a public-domain project, standardebooks.org (not online yet),
to help nudge the industry in the right direction. The idea is to promote a
rigorous typography and coding style guide to public-domain books transcribed
at Gutenberg. Anyone can use these guides, our toolchain, and the ebooks
produced from them as a sort of "best practice" for creating high-quality
epubs that look great on any modern ereader. If you're interested in helping,
drop me a line.

~~~
jpatokal
Otherwise +1, but characterizing EPUB as "sane" is rather charitable of you.
EPUB 2 is an incompatible fork of XHTML c. 2001 with crude CSS and proprietary
cruft, and EPUB 3 is still largely unusable in practice.

~~~
acabal
I disagree on epub3; Standard Ebooks is using it as a base format. While it
certainly is a sometimes-strange mix of XHTML and HTML5, and there are things
I'd personally have done differently, as a means of presenting static
documents it rivals the power that HTML5 on desktop browsers has. (Because
it's basically just HTML5!) Whatever formatting limitations there are are
generally are on the client rendering side--for example, Kindles are
notoriously bad at rendering tables, but that's because the Kindle renderer
sucks, not because any of the competing standards don't have good <table> tag
support.

Plus, since it's basically HTML in a zip file, anybody with basic web page
production knowledge can jump in to producing an epub book. Sure there's some
epub-specific cruft here or there but the core HTML markup has been well-
understood for a decade.

Additionally, the power of HTML5 and epub's semantic inflection standard lets
us mark books up in fascinating new ways that aren't easily possible in
simpler formats. Whether or not that ends up going anywhere we have yet to
see; another thing Standard Ebooks is trying to do is add semantic inflection
to the books we produce.

Yes, it's not great for more complex stuff like interactive ebooks or
javascript and so on, but no format is yet, and ereader technology isn't
really there yet either.

~~~
jpatokal
Sorry, wasn't clear there: EPUB3 as a standard is theoretically OK, but real-
world support of it on ebook readers just isn't there yet. And the update
cycle is a _lot_ slower than browsers or even mobile phones.

Also, do you know what _is_ a great platform for "javascript and interactive
stuff"? The web browser!

------
falcolas
I don't buy as many Ebooks as I would like to for one reason: for the
restrictions which have been put in place, they are too expensive.

I'm renting a (typically lower overall quality) book, but I'm having to pay
the price of a new physical book (give or take a few dollars).

OK, there's two reasons: about 1/3 of the books I'd like to purchase are
unavailable in Ebook form without pirating.

The value is not worth the price.

~~~
gress
How are you renting your ebooks?

~~~
sib
I believe the grandparent is making the point that (s)he does not truly own
the ebook, since it is delivered with DRM and subject to the ability of the
retailer to delete it.

~~~
gress
Renting involves making regular payments. This is a false analogy.

~~~
falcolas
Renting implies paying for the temporary use of something, there's no regular
payments involved. If I rent a movie from RedBox, I'm not making regular
payments - just a single payment covering the cost of the item.

If my use of the Ebook was not dependent on the Amazon (or Apple or B&N)
ecosystem, then it might be easier to think of as a purchase with conditions;
but if my account goes down, so does my ability to freely read the Ebook.

~~~
gress
That's fair - I'm convinced.

------
influxed
When I traveled to eastern Ukraine for work a couple years ago, what surprised
me the most about the culture was the ubiquitous use of ebook readers. It
seemed like everyone had one.

When I asked a Ukrainian colleague why they were so popular, he said it
simple: ebooks are cheap/free and easy to find, and print books are expensive
and require effort to obtain.

One of the biggest points of friction to consuming content is discovery and
paying for it. I think when it's easier to find ebooks and cheaper to purchase
them, adoption will really accelerate. Until then, there isn't much compelling
reason to switch.

~~~
Max_Mustermann
I'd wager most of the books your Ukrainian friends alludes to are the
astoningly easy to find pirated epubs. There's zero to none friction if you
know how to look for them and don't mind reading in English.

I found odd that the author didn't mention piracy.

~~~
dexterdog
He did mention Ukraine. Did he need to be redundant?

------
tjr
[https://stallman.org/ebooks.pdf](https://stallman.org/ebooks.pdf)

~~~
kentosi
The title of that PDF should be changed from "The Danger of Ebooks" to "The
Danger of DRM Ebooks".

------
Turing_Machine
1\. "Single digit growth" is still growth. Even if you accept their numbers
(which have some severe problems, as noted below) compounding will take its
toll eventually.

2\. As the author himself notes (although buried way down in the article),
these "official" sources fail to capture a _very large portion_ of the ebook
market. Specifically, they only reflect books with an ISBN, which is not
required by _any_ of the major U.S. ebook vendors (Amazon, Apple, B&N). Most
indie authors don't bother, given the insane pricing schedule that Bowker
imposes for small quantities of ISBNs.

------
marssaxman
That they come pre-pwned, mostly. I don't really trust digital media.

------
na85
DRM is what's the matter. If I go down to Chapters, I own the book. An ebook
from Amazon is just "licensed"

------
sheepmullet
Publishers _could_ lower the price of ebooks and still make more than they
would on a paperback? Right?

Surely printing costs, distribution costs, and retail costs for a physical
book dwarf the listing fee that Amazon et al charge for an ebook?

~~~
shabble
[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2010/05/cmap-9-e...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2010/05/cmap-9-ebooks.html) (and the rest of his 'Common misconceptions
about publishing'[1] series) covers this idea in quite some detail, and
ultimately concludes that the majority of the cost is in the pre-production
processes, not the physical book printing.

Exactly how ebook pricing relates to any form of sanity is something of
another matter. IIRC Amazon, Apple, etc all take something like 30%+ of the
sale price, and the retail book industry (after allowing for unsold returns
and all the weird accounting jiggery-pokery) operates on quite thin margins.

[1] [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2010/04/common-m...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html)

~~~
sheepmullet
It sounds like the actual pre-production process is cheap ($7-20k for a book).

After reading his blog a fair bit it seems clear that Amazon is the real
winner and that they pocket the savings from switching to ebooks (they take up
to 70% of the sale price!).

------
jpatokal
Back in 2012, I wrote a blog post that predicts e-books will be obsolete by
2017 (2 years to go!) and outlining a few reasons why. TL;DR:

 _Crippled by territorial license restrictions, digital rights management, and
single-purpose devices and file formats that are simultaneously immature and
already obsolescent, they are at a hopeless competitive disadvantage compared
to full-fledged websites and even the humble PDF. ... But once publishers
start breaking ranks (as they are already doing) and major authors start to
self-publish (as they are already doing), the illusion of e-books being a
necessary simulacrum of printed books will start to dissipate._

[http://gyrovague.com/2012/04/30/why-e-books-will-soon-be-
obs...](http://gyrovague.com/2012/04/30/why-e-books-will-soon-be-obsolete-and-
no-its-not-just-because-of-drm/)

