| Given the compelling advantages, it may seem strange that e-books have not been more successful. There are three main reasons for this - the devices, competing formats and DRM.
E-book readers have simply failed to replicate the simple convenience of a printed book. The electronic devices have been awkward to use, sometimes slow to start up, sometimes prone to computer "crashes", and generally failing to offer a user experience which can compete with the familiarity of paper and ink. They have also been expensive, which is to be expected with new technology, battery life is short enough to be a problem, and screen resolutions have been too low to replicate the experience of reading a printed book. Prices will not come down until there is mass adoption, as is usually the case, but all the technical problems can, and no doubt will, be solved. It can be very satisfactory to read a novel on a Tablet PC, and without the need for reading glasses, but currently it requires a very expensive and heavy device.
There are a couple of dozen e-book formats which are competing with each other and to some extent confusing the market: e.g. Adobe PDF, Microsoft Reader, Mobipocket etc. Currently Adobe's PDF seems to be the leader, but it is still a worry that one might end up with the literary equivalent of a shelf full of Betamax movies.
The biggest e-book killer is the attempts by publishers to use Digital Rights Management (DRM) to control the use and copying of titles. One can understand the fears of publishers who have seen the effects of MP3 file sharing on the music industry, and follows the perennial pattern of trying to protect a business model under threat from a new technology. Potentially the book publishing industry is even more vulnerable because the file sizes are smaller and even easier to distribute. Unfortunately the DRM schemes used so far have produced a dreadful user experience, with buyers so frustrated that they vow never to buy an e-book again. There have been horror stories of "one chance" downloads and self-destructing files following a similar pattern to those of DRM protected music files. |