In reading the commentary for this post I see that there are a lot of common misconceptions about e-books, and particularly e-book durability, that continue to be perpetuated. I thought I would inject some real-world, long-term experience on the subject as well as on the progression and viability of the market.
I bought my first e-book in 1998, to read on my Palm 5000, from a little retailer/publisher called Peanut Press. This book was called "Sister, Sister".
Luddites would suggest that I would have long ago lost access to this book. After all, since that time I have switched to a Palm V, then a pair of Handsprings, then a Sony Cleo, then a Palm T|X, then an iPod touch, and today use an iPhone and a Kindle. I lost or destroyed the Palm V, one of the Handsprings, and a Kindle along the line. As it turns out I can still read that book on all of my current e-book capable devices today.
In short, the reading device is ephemeral; possession of the book is orthogonal to the possession of the device. Most e-book critics either do not know this, do not understand it, or deliberately ignore it but it is the case.
To elaborate: Back when I bought my first e-book the Palm could hold about four books in its memory, but my PC could hold a large personal library's worth -- thousands. I could burn a CD with a collection of perhaps 500 books at a shot. Today an extensive personal library will fit on a $5 thumb drive you can buy at the grocery store. As such, having back-ups of your books is both easy and very very cheap. Moreover, unlike the digital music industry, retailers allow you to re-download books you have purchased -- giving you offsite backups in the normal course of things, and protecting your library even from disasters such as floods or fire that would destroy a paper library utterly. Rather than being at a disadvantage e-books, in the best cases, are much more durable due to the ease of copying.
E-books do have a new kind of loss, that of loss of access to the content because the e-book's file format becomes unreadable in one way or another. This will usually happen because the format becomes obsolete or because the format is protected with DRM such that you don't have access to it if, say, you switch devices. This is a real risk, but it's worthwhile to see how this risk has played out over the long term. I've seen it play out several times over at this point.
Early on there were a whole bunch of different e-book formats, and some dedicated devices, and if you picked the wrong one you could be completely out of luck when the industry moved on to something else. I have lost one book entirely as a result of purchasing it in Adobe e-book format, the only format the publisher allowed it to be sold in. This was a horrific format in terms of how restrictive its DRM was, how poor Adobe's reader software was, and in terms of Adobe's ongoing support. Their reader was almost unusable and wrecked formatting, even to the point of breaking in the middle of words at the end of a "page", even though the book loading process required you to spend many minutes waiting for it to be "formatted for your device." After about a year Adobe modified the format in an incompatible way, and required conversion, and the conversion tools were extremely difficult to use. On top of all of that the DRM format was so restrictive that losing the one device that was authorized to read the content caused total loss of the content. Given the poor reading experience it was unsurprising that this format died quickly (and, frankly, Adobe should be ashamed of themselves to have done such a bad job of it).
That represents the worst experience for an e-book. But that is in no way the norm, not then and certainly not today.
Most of today's formats, even the Kindle format (which is, after all, just a minor modification of Mobipocket), allow both DRM restricted and open encoding. There are really only two surviving formats: ePub and Mobipocket, and both are supported on a huge range of devices and obtaining the code to interpret the content is neither difficult nor expensive. From this point forward it is unlikely we will see format obsolescence again, and just as it is with images where any web browser can show you GIF files from the 1980s as well as the newest movie formats, once they're out there in wide use they are supported forever.
DRM is a more interesting issue. Publishers can pick whether or not they require DRM not all do, but all of the big publishers do. Publishers can allow a vendor to reformat a book into new formats, or restrict their ability to do so, and that too goes both ways. Again the big publishers do not allow reformatting, and the big retailers only sell in one format and strongly prefer, if not outright require, DRM. I have significant numbers of books that I can re-download in any of a half dozen or so formats at will, as well as many that are locked to a particular format and restricted by DRM.
The non-DRM format books, like "Sister, Sister", are all still readable on every e-book capable device I own now or have ever owned. The software I used to read it when I bought it is of course long dead not only having been revised beyond recognition, but also having been cycled through three or four companies. Even so, I can choose between dozens of different software packages to read those books. This argues strongly that open formats have excellent durability, but as I said we have already seen that with other electronic media formats so it is no surprise.
The DRM format books are a mixed bag, but not as bad as many people expect. The Adobe-format book is the only one I have lost entirely, and certainly that is because so few books were ever sold in that format. The eReader DRMed books do much better: They are not readable on the Kindle, but they *are* readable on everything else I have. This is because the Kindle reader is (or was, until a week or two ago) a closed software system. No retailer other than Amazon was allowed to add formats to it. With the Kindle opening up I expect to see a port of the eReader software to the platform by the end of the year, assuming of course that Amazon is open enough to allow that kind of competition, but I bet they will -- because Apple certainly does, and Apple is real competition. This argues very strongly that not only are open formats a good idea, but open *platforms* as well. Once a format exists and has achieved reasonable popularity it tends to be supported broadly as long as the platform allows third-party software. I would be very surprised if the industry does not settle into platforms that are extensible by third parties.
So, I have managed to lose one book entirely and have moderately annoying restricted access on I think about 80 others (out of more than 300), and it is likely that the restriction will disappear as the e-book readers evolve into general platforms. This is hardly the dire consequences of DRM that has been promoted by e-book critics!
The real loss with DRM is that I can't give the book away, or lend it. This is undeniably a new restriction on consumers, but with so many books read once and thrown away, rather than recycled to other consumers, and with lower prices due to lower unit costs, my guess is that this is not going to do much to inhibit mass-market e-book penetration. It may even have significant consumer benefits in some markets, like textbooks, although it remains to be seen whether publishers will share the new economies with a market they have become accustomed to raping. I bet they do because freely redistributable content is exploding. Once that stuff is out there it lives forever, and gets better and better over time, as we have seen with Wikipedia and teachers and students alike are annoyed with the high cost of textbooks so there should be real competition.
It's worth considering how that compares to paper book longevity. Over the years I have lost books to floods, to bugs, to the inconvenience of moving them, to spilled drinks, to dropping them somewhere, etc. I've certainly lost hundreds out of a lifetime library of perhaps 5,000 books, and in one case lost almost my entire library in a single disaster (a broken pipe in my apartment). I have no paper book back-ups, no capability to reproduce those books when lost without paying for them all over again -- and in many cases I cannot even buy them, as they are no longer published or available in the used market at any price. An e-book never goes out of print; even if I should lose every back-up, even if the retailer goes out of business, I will still be able to get it from someone, even though I may have to pay for it again.
I think it is clear from my example that there are wins and losses with each format, and there is no clear winner as to which is the better choice long-term in terms of longevity of the individual book.
DRM issues will work themselves out. I doubt very much that DRM will disappear as it did with MP3s; e-book readers have primarily been open platforms such that you could load a new software package in order to read a new format; that was not true of MP3 players, which were fixed platforms. That gave the music publishers little option when one hardware vendor dominated the market.
Another complaint is that e-books need batteries. This is, or rather was, a very legitimate complaint. That original Palm 5000 could read for about 20 hours on a single set of AAA batteries. This was good for a week or so of my typical reading (longer, really, since that was not a great reading device so I still read most stuff in paper). The move to color LCDs wrecked that: The Cleo, for instance, could read for only about 4 hours, although the iPod touch (what a wonderful little device) improved things to about 8. Color LCD readers still, to this day, are marginal for all-day reading even ignoring ergonomic issues. But that is not the only technology available, nor even the one best suited to long reading sessions.
E-ink based devices do so much better as to change the game. You don't measure their battery life in hours, but in days or weeks. The shortest battery life comes with devices that have cellular access on all the time; my Kindle2 will go about three days on a charge if the wireless is enabled, with heavy reading and with little or no downloading other than periodicals. This is pretty much irrespective of how much reading I do with the device, it's the network access that is expensive in terms of battery power. But it is rare that I am away from power for three days; I usually plug it in after I finish reading at bedtime, but if I forget for a day or two it doesn't matter. If I go on a long trip without access to power -- such as the week-long camping trips I tend to do every year -- I simply turn off the wireless access and the device can be used heavily for about 7 days without recharging, even if I never turn it off completely. I don't know how long it would run if I powered it down when I was sleeping or doing other long-duration things, but certainly weeks, and I tend to read for around five hours a day when I'm on vacation. At that point battery life is determined primarily by how many pages you turn, and these devices easily support thousands of page turns.
With battery life like this you are not tied to a power cord and the difference between the device and a paper book is not very significant. Unless you're in a third-world location without power the need to recharge is not much of a detriment. I think this compares very well to paper -- a paper book is only good for the number of page turns that it contains, usually 300-500. After that it's just dead weight and you have to replace it with another to keep reading, which is often considerably less convenient than sticking a power cord in an outlet. (Ok, you could keep re-reading the paper book ad infinitum, but do you really want to do that?)
The only significant detriment to e-books in terms of reading time that I have found, using e-ink devices, is that the airlines don't consider them equivalent to paper books and make you turn them off during take-off and landing. (I just hide it until the stewards sit down, and have never even been scolded, but then again these things were very rare until recently.) This is at worst a minor annoyance, and is more than made up for by the fact that I can carry enough books to ensure I never run out, without having to lug extra weight as a consequence. (Lugging one of those Harry Potter bricks around for a week while camping, when I finished it on the second day, kind of sucked.)
Having said that, there are some very clear downsides to e-books in some situations, at least today. Photography and illustrations are poorly represented, even with the best LCD displays. With e-ink they're more like suggestions than images. I have huge stacks of photography books that are not going to be replaced by e-books without dramatic changes in display technology but I am not certain that such changes will not come along, particularly as the e-book ecosystem takes hold. There will be big money in low-power, high contrast, color displays so you can count on progress in that area.
My personal experience aside, there are questions about the viability of the e-book ecosystem, in particular whether or not authors or publishers can survive in a world full of them. People point especially to the hurt that MP3s put on the music industry, and that the web has put on the news industry. Both of those are false comparisons.
The music industry is hurting not so much because of the new format, or even the easy ability to copy music. Notice, for instance, that Apple is the largest music retailer on earth even though a person who buys one song from them could in theory give it away to anyone, now that they are not DRM restricted. It is obvious at this point that a large fraction of music consumers will pay for their content even if they could get it for free, and that the early widescale theft was likely as much a matter of the lack of availability of legitimate content sources as anything else. The labels allowed Apple to sell their stuff and next thing you know Apple is a huge retailer. Hmm.
No, the industry is hurting because they had become accustomed to being able to force customers to buy a whole collection of songs when the customer really only wanted one. This in some ways was a trade-off in both directions. Unit cost of a single was really no different from a collection, so pricing for a record or CD single was relatively high out of necessity. When the cost of production of a single dropped to negligible that artificial artifice went away and the consumer naturally started to buy only what they really wanted. This certainly hurt profitability of the labels, but let's set all kidding aside -- they're making very good money from downloads anyway now that there are legitimate outlets, and they're finding ways to sell that same content over and over via different channels that were simply not available before. You can argue that Apple holds undue power over that industry, but I think that is the fault of the labels in taking so long to open their wares to multiple publishers that the one company that *did* have the rights could sew up the market with lock-in. Moreover, Apple wouldn't have achieved this lock-in without the DRM mandated by the labels: Fairplay and AAC makes it difficult to impossible to migrate your collection to some other company's player, creating a natural resistance to hardware competition even after DRM was dropped. (But this will not be durable across generations so enjoy it while you can, Apple.)
E-books don't have any of these problems. They are a natural unit so we won't see unit price deflation on account of break-up. It is difficult to make an e-book from a physical copy, so there aren't a lot of illegitimate copies to undermine e-book sales in the nascent market. E-book retailing is well established at this point, well ahead of mass adoption; there will not be a Napster. And e-book reading technology is software based, not hardware, so DRM support can move around between hardware vendors -- eliminating market locks such as Apple has enjoyed, and giving the publishers far more power.
The other example regularly cited by critics is the destruction of the newspaper by the web. This too is a false comparison. News is a commodity, as are classified ads. News was only valuable when the means of distribution was so expensive that only a few could undertake the enterprise. The web took away that restriction, the near monopoly of news services, and the price of news fell to the floor immediately. In many ways the industry has only itself to blame: Over time most newspapers have become little more than reprinting services for stories off the wire, with ever-decreasing original content. They got lazy but were largely protected from repercussion by the high cost of printing and distribution. This new distribution medium burst upon them and all of a sudden any Joe Blow who could afford a wire feed could put up his own web news service and lose little in terms of content compared to the traditional guys and with lower overhead he was even more immediate. This was only made worse because and some random guy could and did put together a classified ad system in his spare time that could not only compete but improve on the customer experience -- taking out the only remaining really profitable part of the newspaper business.
(As an aside, this is why delisting your newspaper from Google News is a stupid idea. When there are so many free sources there is no lock-in, and the best you're going to be able to do is make your stuff easier to find than the other guy's. If the newspapers want to live they really need to start writing their own stuff again, but my gut call is that the weeklies kill them in this respect now that they can publish rapidly too. Real editing and in-depth opinion is worth something.)
The newspaper example does apply to e-books, but not the way that most people think. Books are *all* original content; as such they are not and will not be commodities as long as copyright holds. We can see this easily already by comparing the availability of copyrighted versus out-of-copyright content in electronic format today. Books still in copyright command much higher prices than those that are out of copyright; the latter have turned into commodities, available from so many sources that you cannot charge much for them -- just like news. It used to be that a publisher could make good money by reprinting out-of-copyright material because there just weren't that many publishers. Today anyone can do it, and the price of that content has completely collapsed. But not so books that are still in copyright! In e-book format those books demand prices not so much different from their printed counterparts. In fact, the prices are very much in-line with the difference in printing and wholesaling costs, excepting Amazon's recent release prices, which are widely considered to be a loss leader for Amazon and a practice that is already dissolving.
The publishing industry certainly knows this. Publishers (such as Penguin) who made a lot of money reprinting out-of-copyright stuff will certainly see (probably have already seen) that business disappear, but by and large the industry knows they're still going to get paid well for their content. The complaint right now is that e-books are demolishing the hardcover book market, the market in which the business makes a lot of their money.
It is true that this is happening, and it's only going to get worse, but it is not going to be the end of the publishing industry by any means. In fact, a revolution with startling similarities already happened in the book publishing industry in the 1930s -- with the paperback book. The first publisher to really jump into paperbacks with both feet, Penguin, made a mint because they were able to reach a mass audience (train riders in particular) that high book prices and limited title availability had otherwise excluded. They could publish cheap and broadly, and the more they printed and the cheaper the books got the more people bought and the more money Penguin made. The rest of the industry followed suit shortly thereafter. The business model changed drastically but the industry ended up even more profitable than before.
So it will be with e-books, too. Publishers will make more money on early releases by simply holding prices up during the initial demand surge, and then make even more money in the long run by making copies available broadly and so inexpensively that people will pick them up on a lark -- and with cellular stores and delivery, it's much easier to make impulse buys!
Amazon has been making waves by selling recent releases for much less than hardcovers, perhaps even at a loss, and demolishing the market for hardcovers in the process. This is bad for publishers in the short term but no one expects that practice to continue very long. Amazon needs (or probably needed at this point) to do so in order to incent buyers to pay hundreds of dollars for a reader. If you read a lot of books then the reader easily pays for itself; over the time since the Kindle was released (I bought it within an hour of it going on sale) I have saved enough money on books to pay for three readers and then some. That wouldn't have been the case if the recent releases had been priced "naturally." But the price of the readers is falling very fast as they become commodities -- and the cheaper they are, the less the price differential between paper and electronic needs to be as an incentive to switch. More people will buy readers and buy e-book content, the more content is purchased the will become available, the more content that's available the more reason to buy a reader -- and the feedback loop becomes concrete.
Murdoch is claiming that e-books will kill paper books and he is (mostly) correct. That is simple economics. But that doesn't mean it will destroy publishing. It's not such a good time to become a printer, though that profession is shortly going to go the way of the horseshoe maker.
It's unfortunate that paper books are going to get much more expensive as their volumes drop, but a real cap exists in that on-demand publishing is not terribly expensive. Moreover, this will have some good results for the paper book aficionado -- you know that low-production paperback you always loved, but that is tattered to the point of being hard to read, and you can't find a new copy? No longer will it be "out of print." In fact, spend a little more and they'll even make you a quarter-bound hardcopy version, one that never existed previously. I am a large consumer of e-books but I look forward to being able to get hardbound copies of my favorite books.
Long-winded commentary, I realize, but I hope insightful.
