eBook vs iPod

Author Nick Hornby, author of my favorite book and movie - High Fidelity recently made a blog post after seeing an empty bookstore with paperbacks going unsold at £4($8) per book and the iRex Iliad going unsold at £399($800). In it he compares the book-eBook relationship to the CD-MP3 relationship, and concludes that the relationship, and thus the outcomes are different. And he's absolutely right in the points he makes.

No normal person would spend $800 to buy a device to then buy a book when they can just get the book for $8, especially when they aren't even buying the $8 book. Nor would someone want to have to re-buy books they already own just to have a digital copy (Personally I think we could all use those CueCats from RadioShack a few years back to scan barcodes to download the digital versions - finally a use for the damn thing). So yes, the truth is the eBook will never replace the book the way the MP3 player replaced the CD.

But all hope is not lost.

The prevalence of the eBook needs to start in the education sector. Textbooks are many times the size, weight, and cost of an ordinary book. Add to the fact that a student has several at a time and you've got the perfect sector for the eBook: carry multiple large items with you in one small lightweight unit. Additionally, the convertible tablet PC makes the idea even more perfect. Use it like a notebook to write a paper, take notes in tablet mode, and fold it flat to read and annotate an eBook - a true all in one device.

Unfortunately, for it to become prominent, if one was going to spend several hundred on a reader, they would want the costs associated with the books to be significantly lower. Publishers could cut the material costs out of the price, but would probably have to add in some costs for digital distribution and the inevitable piracy. Furthermore, it would require them to undergo an infrastructure change from mass producing print media to some sort of mass production of digital hard copy (if that is such a thing?)

But, since eBooks aren't popular, most publishers don't provide them for textbooks, so they won't become popular. Isn't it amazing how the chicken-or-egg debate always shows up in unpopular technologies?

The real sadness is that the good is outweighed by the profitability of the technology. The educational gains that could be gained by taggable annotations of a digital textbooks are lost. The health gains from not carrying around an overloaded bag. The environmental gains - producing paper uses 42% of the timber cut each year, is the single largest industrial use of water, and accounts for one third of greenhouse gas production - are all lost, just because it won't make as much money.