The Future of eBooks
The New York Times reports that Amazon and Google are entering the eBook market, the former with Kindle, a new eBook device that will compete with the Sony Reader and the latter through a paid online service. I recently spoke to Fine Books & Collectibles about my view of the eBook market. In a nutshell, I’m not bullish on eBooks.
Here is a quick recap of why I feel eBooks are still a long way off from going mainstream:
- Reading is an active rather than a passive activity like music. It’s time intensive and less repeatable.
- There is no intrinsic advance in books or reading like there has been in music or movies. Books have been portable for quite a while.
- There is limited pent-up demand for eBooks. You can’t burn your shelf copy of Player Piano to your reader.
- Entrenchment and inertia within the publishing and retailing industries. What to do with lots of huge Barnes and Noble stores?
As the Lifestyle editor for Vizu, I ran a poll across a cross section of 50 websites to find out the level of interest in eBooks. The question?
On a scale of 1 to 5, how interested are you in eBooks?
The 5 point scale used ‘1′ for very interested, ‘3′ as neutral and ‘5′ as not interested. The results? Out of 677 responses, 37.5% were not interested, while 19.4% were very interested. A normal way to view a 5 point scale is % above neutral versus % below neutral. In this way we find that 32% score above while 49.2% score below.
So, 1 out of 3 have a favorable interest in eBooks. That doesn’t sound too bad until you factor in that an Internet audience is the prime market for this product, both in terms of technology, level of education and the propensity to read. Analyzed with this knowledge, these figures paint a less than rosy picture for eBooks in the short-term.
