Ebook musings

[andygates]

Since I've had my reader for a while, and gorged on half a dozen novels and a pile of science PDFs, here's some bearded sagacity for the future:

The successful vendor must be format-agnostic.  Offer the book as a download, then give the customer a choice.  Write a little app to detect the platform, rememer it in their profile, and offer the best option, otherwise give a pick of the standard (EPUB) and the proprietory (Kindle, Mobi, Spaceflaps).  If your store doesn't allow me to buy an ebook, I'll go elsewhere to buy books in general, and then you've lost my treebook sales too.

PDF blows goats.  Seriously.  Make it reflowable and resizeable or go home.  If you think your page layout matters more than being readable, you're dead wrong. 

E-newspaper subscriptions are dead.  C'mon, it's a crippled version of a feed aggregator (there's a market niche there for an "RSS-to-EPUB" converter in there - Feedbooks, Zinepal, TeleRead et al come close but it hasn't had its ipod moment yet).  Definitely not worth the premium, on which note...

Downloads are worth less than paper.  I can't give a download as a present, I can't hug a download and remember its smell, I can't find a blade of grass from that camping holiday in a download, a download isn't bent by my lover's hands.  Downloads are commodity pap: it is ridiculous to charge as much or more for them.  Tenner for the book, fiver for the download, that's about right.  DRM makes a download worth even less, because it can't be shared and is subject to the whim of technical gremlins.  

Let me down and I go to BitTorrent.  Why isn't your full catalogue available online?  Don't pad it with the Gutenberg stuff, you big fakers.  If it's out there, you should be selling it.  If the vendor gets in the way, it's torrentin' time.

Trilogies and partworks rock.  Without the bulk of treebooks, downloads are perfect for epic series.  Bundle 'em up: all the Harry Potters in one go?  An easy sale.  And if you want to keep readers coming back, the partwork format is super-easy to do without all the physical overheads (and stock risk on series that tank).  A fresh Glass Books or Dark Tower novella every couple of months? 

Fat Zines.  Paper zines and current electronic zines are choked on layout and limited in size.  There's nothing to stop fat zines from rolling up big chunks of material.  A monthly Nanowrimo 'reader's digest' with half a dozen of the best novels, along a theme?  Technically trivial.

Comments

[andygates.livejournal.com]

I got the Cool-er, because of the very light weight (180g), 6" screen and the clean physical layout (looks like an ipod). The same guts are marketed as the Bookeen with better software and fussier hardware, but broadly good reviews. The Cool-er's interface is a bit 1.0 and I figure bad software will eventually turn good in the updates, so I've opted for the hardware. The other candidate I considered was the Sony pocket, but it's a 5" screen and a lot heavier, so while it's lovely, it's not what I wanted.

(The firmware's just a linux variant, nerd wrangling ahoy)