Comments on: How e-Books Won the War

By: E-books and White Spaces on the Rise in Q3: Tech News «

E-books and White Spaces on the Rise in Q3: Tech News « — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 21:45:30 +0000

[...] book retailing culminated in yet another milestone signifying the pending triumph of e-books. In August, Barnes & Noble announced it was evaluating strategic business alternatives, including a potential sale of the company. Indeed, we expect that most of the remaining [...]

By: The Book is Dead! Long Live the Book

The Book is Dead! Long Live the Book — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:02:13 +0000

[...] how much time I spend on the go, I’m not surprised that I’ve started to buy more electronic versions of books. I haven’t lost my ardor for paper; it’s just that they are becoming a tad impractical [...]

By: Maybe I was wrong about e-books « About Writing – The Personal Blog of Pace J Miller

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 10:11:57 +0000

[...] this article by Michael Wolf entitled “How e-Books Won the War”. I wouldn’t exactly go that far myself (there’s still some life in the old hardcopy I [...]

By: aaron

aaron — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:18:05 +0000

“Subscribe to read the rest of this article”

I’m writing an article predicting the end of paywall content.

I imagine it’ll come true sooner than your article.

By: buybooksonline

buybooksonline — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 23:24:19 +0000

Although I agree the proliferation of e-book readers will have a large impact on the sale of print books, I think the death of the book is a long way off. If books could talk they might be inclined to quote the great Mark Twain “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated “.

By: Cat Eldridge

Cat Eldridge — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 21:39:45 +0000

It is possible in the digital age for a local, place-bound bookstore to thrive. Here in Portland, Maine with Borders a mere few miles away ( which is thriving as well), these is a bookstore that has seen it’s sales go up every year that Amazon has been around by stressing quality customer service, stocking the books their customers want, and being involved in community events.

Neither the net nor ebooks are a threat if you know your local book buying community.

By: Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 13:25:22 +0000

@john – Amazon’s software/app strategy has been their most important strategic play – they’re riding the iPad success in eBooks as much as Apple is, IMO.

Agreed that lock-in to single platforms for you electronic content IS an issue that will ultimately need to be addressed as this market becomes bigger, but as we’ve seen with music, there’s not necessarily any resolution coming other than some vendors might decide to drop DRM (a la Amazon and eventually Apple) for competitive reasons.

As for you breaking the law w/de-DRMing, no comment :)

By: Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 13:21:53 +0000

@Eric – I would say prices of new eBooks are generally much less than retail pricing (at brick and mortar), and while Amazon discounts heavily enough that price differences are not huge between hardcover and eBooks, online book buyers are the first to go eBook (Amazon’s own numbers are a testament to that).

I think that while #2 above is important, that issue hasn’t become big enough where most people actually care, meaning it hasn’t seeped into the public consciousness. Also – you have an online store locker for books w/Kindle, so if you lose your Kindle reader, you don’t lose your books.

By: Eric

Eric — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 08:45:52 +0000

eBooks and readers still have a long way to go before they are embraced by the common market.
1. Look at pricing of ebooks – initially they are a little less than the hardcover price, but by the time that the paperback version is out they are still at that same price of near paperback rather than the $5 – $7 that the trade paperback is selling for – even if there was never a hardcopy version you still need to pay $10 for the book in eformat.
2. Look at format, so far we have seen people who were early adopters of the Kindel discover that their original purchase could be stolen back out of their devices (1984 incident last year), rendered obsolete by a new proprietary format on the device, or lost should the device fail or break.
3. Exclusivity deals that limit the book to a single device.

There needs to be more understanding of who and how people use books (education, recreation, etc.) and a single format standard that will work (in color) across devices at a competitive price vs hardcopy books before this war is won.

By: john

john — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 02:08:19 +0000

Amazon thus far has been clever in supporting every new device and OS. Otherwise I think a firestorm would already be brewing over DRM–according to Amazon, you don’t really “own” any of the books you buy from them. And they’re not about to make it any easier to move your library to a competing platform.

(Violating the law, I de-DRM’d all my Amazon books using readily available tools and never plan to buy any again–it’s all Gutenberg, Instapaper, and paper books for my Kindle and iPhone.)