More obstacles for eBook adoption.

by WyldKard on May 8, 2009

By chance, shortly after writing our take on the status of eBooks and the Kindle movement, we hopped online to buy a bunch of books that we’ve been meaning to acquire. The books themselves aren’t specifically relevant to this discussion, but what is relevant is the type of books we were after. To clarify, the books we were looking to get were, in general, reference books for various things:

  1. I Will Teach You to be Rich, by Ramit Sethi.
  2. The Transition Town: from Oil Dependence to Local Resilience, by Rob Hopkins
  3. My Tank is Fight!, by Jack Parsons
  4. How to Make Wargames Terrain, from Games Workshop

The first two books we picked up are available for the Kindle, and as we briefly considered buying the eBook versions to view on our , we quickly realized the folly of that idea. Ultimately, what it came down to was the convenience of not having a physical copy of the book versus the advantage of not keeping the book to begin with. In other words, the (slight) financial advantage that came along with saving space in our home was temporary: in reality, we probably won’t keep either book around for long anyway.

In the case of the first book, a financial guide, we intend to gift the book soon after we acquire it. That raises the simple question of sharing , which, we understand, usually have DRM attached to prevent rampant eBook piracy. This is interesting because it means that owners of a book can’t easily transfer that property if it’s in eBook format, compared to physical books that can be given away after one is done with them. With , the assumption is that the first owner will be the last owner, and as a result, eBook sellers will make more money than with traditional books, because people won’t be lending their eBook readers to friends; if a friend wants an eBook you have, they’ll be forced to buy their own copy. In our situation, perhaps there’s a way to gift an eBook to someone else’s account, but it’s clearly not as simple as just shipping a book to them, or giving a book to them in person, especially if we intend to flip through it first.

The second book on our list, related to transition towns and sustainable communities, is one that we intend on reading and then passing off to our significant other. After that, depending on how good of a reference it is, we’ll either hang on to it, give it to a friend, or sell it. With both latter options, the eBook option is ultimately poor, once again because of the restrictions on eBook ownership. Also, loaning out our , even to our significant other, just to read a book now and again, is an inconvenience. If we had a Kindle, this might not be a problem, since we wouldn’t take a Kindle everywhere we go, but the problem of transferring ownership once again comes up if we later want to pass the book on.

Put simply, there’s no market for second-hand , which is probably one of the main reasons Amazon is happy to start the eBook bandwagon. For consumers, who don’t intend to keep a book they buy long-term, going the eBook route doesn’t make sense unless the convenience of not having physical copies is really worth that much to them. For most people, however, especially those who are happy to recoup some money by selling used books down the road, the only way are worthwhile is if they’re substantially cheaper than their physical counterparts. For example, if we were to buy a $10 book new, and were able to get $5 from a used bookstore a month from now, then we effectively only spent $5 to “rent” the book. This means that the eBook option would only have been worthwhile if the eBook was priced at $5, half the price the physical version sold for. This is why non-reference books don’t make as much sense in the eBook format; works of fiction, which will likely only be read once before being discarded, are ideal candidates in their physical form, since some of their cost can be recouped later. For books that will definitely be kept around, however, even after they’re read initially, the eBook option begins to make sense, since they’re not books whose price can be recouped later from a second-hand sale.

As for the last two books we picked up, they were not available on the Kindle. The third book, half-fiction and half-history book, would have made a decent eBook – we’re not quite sure if we’d keep it long-term, though there’s a good chance we would. The pictures included are, we believe, black-and-white or grayscale images at best, so the Kindle would be a good candidate for this work. The fourth book, however, a reference guide for modeling wargaming terrain, includes colour photographs that would look poor on a Kindle. That said, since we’re likely to keep this reference book around and not sell it, it would be a good eBook candidate if we had a good, large-screen colour display for it. Alas, the Kindle does not have colour e-ink yet, and the is simply too small of a display device for this kind of work.

Ultimately, will pick up more momentum, but the lack of a second-hand market is a factor against their proliferation. What Amazon should be doing right now, especially with the larger Kindle DX now showcased, is getting publishers of reference books on-board. That is, Amazon should be targeting publishers of academic text-books, as well as publishers of field manuals (for mechanics, makers, etc). If this segment of the publishing industry widely adopted the eBook format, it would be much easier to get people to adopt an expensive device like the Kindle DX. Of course, for industry and the academic community, physical reference books are already very pricey, so moving to an eBook platform with appropriate price differences compared to traditional publications would be worthwhile. (Students could recoup the cost of a Kindle DX much more easily if textbooks in eBook format were just a little cheaper than their physical counterparts, especially since some already spend hundreds of dollars on books per semester. After a few semesters, the Kindle DX could have paid for itself.)

The only other factor here is ease-of-reference, which we addressed in our last post. If cost and availability of reference books in eBook format were no longer factors, the Kindle itself would need a quick, efficient way to flip back and forth between user-defined sections. Right now, we’re not so sure the Kindle is adequate for that purpose. Still, the obvious potential for to overtake the conventional book format is there, particularly in academic and industrial circles.

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