Opinions are like assh—uh, noses. Everyone has one, and they all, uh, smell. The latest opinion to bring this saying to mind comes courtesy of TheEBookReader.com, whose latest blog post posits that e-ink e-readers need to “go back to replicating the experience of reading on paper.”
My first reaction to this was one of puzzlement: when did e-ink ever stop replicating the experience of reading on paper? As opposed to LCD phones and tablets, which pretty clearly look like reading from a computer screen held in your hand. But the blogger seems to feel that little issues like a glossy plastic screen surface on the latest Paperwhite or the “cold and slick” glass screen and metal back of the latest Oasis make them somehow less paper-book-like than e-ink readers of yore. The blogger waxes eloquent over Sony’s 13.3″ DPT-RP1 e-ink PDF reader, and wishes modern e-ink readers could be more like that. (Of course, Sony doesn’t even make e-ink ebook readers anymore.)
The funniest thing about all this is, I suppose, that this is just another face of the “smell of books” aesthetic argument. Anything that makes the experience more like a paper book is good, and anything that makes it less like it is bad. Also, it focuses only on a limited number of examples, both of them from Amazon. Perhaps if the blogger checked out the Kobo Clara or Kobo Forma, they would find them more to their liking.
Where the argument really falls down is that the blogger is assuming their preferences are universal. The thing is, that seems to be far from the case. As I’ve noted before, e-ink reader sales have been declining dramatically in the last few years. Only the die-hard e-ink fans seem to be buying them anymore. Judging by the sales figures, most people don’t seem to care whether their phone or tablet is terribly paper-book-like at all.
And for someone who first began and loved e-reading back in the ’90s, on a device with barely more resolution than a pocket calculator, and didn’t see any problem with it at the time, the argument is even more ridiculous. Could anything possibly have been less paper-book-like than my old 160×160 pixel Visor Deluxe, on which I read many, many thousands of words? If someone really wants to read, they’ll read on whatever device they have, and like it.
I think if I were in that blogger’s shoes, I’d be less inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth. It surely won’t be too many more years before tablets have taken over the market and e-ink readers are no longer available at all—and how will they have a paper-book-like experience then?
Epaper readers are dying not because they’re not enough like paper but because they do too little. They do little more than display books. Most people, concerned with their budgets and keeping down clutter, have decided to use much more versatile tablets or to make do reading on their smartphones.
I’d love to see the epaper technology adapted for other purposes. I’d like to see a book-sized epaper display that would get images from an smaller-screen iPhone yards away. I’d love to have a large-screen epaper display that could show the final appearance of books I’ve laying out with InDesign. But neither product exists probably because there’s insufficient interest on the part of the public. Their tablets and smartphones are good enough. A good enough technology people have will always win out of limited one that costs more money for only a slight improvement.
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The real problem with ebooks is the dreadfully inadequate epub format. There’s a wealth of things that digital books could do but don’t because epub is so ill-conceived. Those responsible for it seem to fall into two categories.
1. The geeky, nerdy type for whom hidden, esoteric stuff matters most. They’re the ones who think it a big deal that a recent update to epub downgrades on form of the ebook equivalent of a table of contents. “Who cares?,” I thought when I heard that. That contents data could be included for the next fifty years with no harm done.
2. The visionaries who lack sense. These are the ones who think that digital reading should be accompanied by multimedia, including video scenes and background music. That’s absurd. Videos are expensive to do well. Few writers and publishers can afford to add even a couple of minutes of poorly done video to their books and those who want background music while they read can turn on a radio or join a music service.
I can give an example of what epub should do. You see accordion text on webpages. it allows text to be concealed or revealed as the user choses. It’s far better than the pitful epub workaround, clumsy pop-up windows. It could be used in hundreds of ways to offer additional information in both fiction and non-fiction books, including dealing with graphics. Why isn’t it there? Why do most ebooks still look like the ones who first appeared on Palm devices twenty years ago?
That’s stupid, really stupid, and it’s why ereaders are dying and ebooks languishing. It’s even why Amazon displayed good sense when it didn’t adopt epub but chose to create its own standard.
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Background music would actually be a nice enhancement to some books. But music licensing issues would likely make it impossible to do unless the e-book company also runs a music streaming service. There IS one such company…
What COULD be done would be implementation of an interface that would let the e-reader software talk to your choice of streaming music service so it could play the music from there.
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e-ink reader sales have been declining dramatically in the last few years.
They are no longer novelties. Those who want e-readers have already purchased them: saturated market. As such, declining sales are no surprise.
I am embarrassed to tell how many e-readers I have, but suffice it to say that I have more than one.
There is no need to purchase a new e-reader every year and throw out the old model, as a lot of people used to do with cars. The Nook Simple Touch I purchased 6 years ago is still functioning, though the rubberized surface has taken a beating. That rubberized surface was not one of B&N’s better decisions.
E-reader software could use some improvements. Amazon has been fairly responsive to customer demands, like having AZW3 with traditional page numbers and fonts with adjustable boldface. B&N’s record on improving software in response to customer demands is not as good, such as bold font choices. B&N’s software on collections has improved, though.
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I happen to like the e-ink format and the long battery life. Unfortunately, Amazon has stopped making e-ink based readers that also have text-to-speech, which I’d been using to listen to books while driving. When my current old Kindle Touch breaks, I will have no options available to get those two features together (e-ink and TTS), so I will likely switch to a tablet or laptop and never buy another dedicated reader. So, it’s a problem of the modern models being too specialized for too little benefit.
Also, battery life probably doesn’t concern most users, since mobile batteries are good enough now that recharging isn’t a big hassle. So if the only thing you’re offering is a $100+ device that does nothing but display books, the only selling point seems to be “the screen looks slightly nicer than a regular display”.
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I just want to say: I switched to a 13 inch Samsung tablet a few years ago and never looked back. I want to display epubs, pdfs and mobi on the same device, and the android tablet does that perfectly. Aside from color screens, I have 64 gigs of memory and 64 gigs of external memory on the card.
That said, I am constantly using that sucker and constantly recharging it. I estimate that I’m using that thing easily 8 hours a day.
I wouldn’t mind returning to e-ink and relegating the android tablet to handle non-book stuff. But I would be looking for something 1)with hard buttons, 2)something that supports epub natively via cloud and 3)something that is a bigger form factor than the typical kindle. The Kindle Oasis is barely bigger than the Paperwhite, and yet cost twice as much? Doesn’t compute .
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