The Second Coming of Ebooks

By Georgy S Thomas
With online sales surging ahead this US holiday season,
there’s an unmistakable buzz in the air about the coming of
age of eReaders and eBooks. Last year, Amazon, the world’s
largest online retailer, had failed to cash in on an Oprah
Winfrey-inspired surge in the sales of its Kindle eReader
when the devices got sold out ahead of the peak shopping
season. This year, it’s pulling all stops to harvest the hunger
for its blockbuster product, already its top seller across all
categories. First, the company slashed the device price.
Second, it untethered itself from the predominantly
American CDMA platform by unveiling an international
version aligned to AT&T’s GSM 3G network. Third, after
painfully stitching together regional alliances with myriad
publishers, it then unleashed the device for sales in over 100
countries, including India. Fourth, it cut the prices of the
global version further and abandoned the US-only model.
And finally, it released its big screen, larger storage Kindle
DX version too globally.

Others are not far behind. Sony, the No.2 vendor at an

estimated 525,000 units sold till October against Amazon’s
945,000, is targeting the holiday season with the new ‘Daily
Edition’. Plastic Logic, a promising start-up, has just released
its high-end device, the ‘Que proReader’ at the Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. IRex Digital, a spin-
off from Philips, released the 3G-enabled ‘DR 800SG’ in
September. Barnes and Noble, the largest US book retailer,
recently released its ‘Nook’ to rave reviews, though supply
woes have forced it to hang a ‘sold-out’ notice for holiday
shoppers. Dozens of other niche and bigger players are
jostling for a slice of the pie, estimated at one million devices
this season for the US alone. And although in the US,
newspapers are in the recession trough and printed book
sales are plummeting, eBook sales have skyrocketed an
astonishing 177% to $97 million for the January-August 2009
period. No wonder an entire industry is holding its breath for
the arrival later this month of the Apple iSlate (as rumour
mills would have it), nursing fond hopes that the tablet from
the famed tech bellwether could emerge as a game changer.

Not another false dawn

To be sure, eReaders and eBooks have had several false
dawns before. The space is littered with the abandoned
carcasses of ‘game changing’ devices like Rocket eBook
Reader, EveryBook, SoftBook and Librius Millennium Reader.
It’s déjà vu for Barnes and Noble and Amazon too, both
having launched eBook stores in 2000, before shutting them
down a few years later. Content quality is the main reason
cited for these previous efforts floundering. For one,
conventional publishers put outlandish price tags on their
eBooks as they feared they would eat into paper sales.
Publishers also were loath to give digital rights to their best
content, often demanding large sums upfront. Horror stories
abound of eBook sellers struggling with typos, even as they
were contractually barred from making corrections. To top it
all, the royalty charged was often 50% of the list price,
enough to squeeze out whatever juice remained.

Powering the second coming of the eBook revolution are

quite a few qualitative changes. The huge corpus of free,
public domain books made available online in recent years
has resulted in even niche eBook sellers enjoying the
advantage of economies of scale. Instead of displaying
empty shelves while waiting for fresh content, they can now
fill them up with classics, embellish them with attractive
cover art, order and list them across categories, and provide
powerful search tools as well as downloads in the format of
choice. Even established book sellers tap into public domain
books. Of the one million eBooks available for sale in Barnes
and Noble’s store, fully 500,000 are public domain books
scanned by Google. With the shelves full, fresh content
inevitably follows for even start-ups in the eBook seller
space. Many new authors now do not mind offering free or
low-priced books as a marketing ploy, so long as it helps in
building a loyal fan base. The eBook sellers then add value
with filters like rankings and recommendations, making it a
real Long Tail business.

The E Ink edge

Another game changer for eReaders has been the
widespread adoption of E Ink technology, which traces its
origins to research done in the MIT Labs in the 1990s. Unlike
liquid-crystal display (LCD), E Ink Corporation’s electronic
paper display (EPD) does not need a backlight, displays even
when power is down, and looks brighter in strong light. It
also draws little power from the device’s battery, with one
charge good for 7,500 page turns. The reading experience is
pleasant and mimics print.

The gradual embrace of a common format in ePub, promoted

by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), has also
helped. All the new crop of eReaders mentioned above, save
for the Kindle, support ePub. Free 3G wireless connection
and its convenience of direct eBook purchase in seconds,
pioneered by Amazon, is now a standard feature. Traditional
publishers too are careful not to repeat past mistakes. They
have ensured that more books, especially best-sellers, are
available. And finally, the US newspaper industry, smarting
from declining sales, rising costs and the earlier blunder of
deciding to give away content for free online, is eyeing the
new crop of eReaders with fresh hope. Indian players take
note.

Share at your peril

Second coming or not, the management of content rights
still remains a bugbear element. With the Kindle, for
instance, books purchased can be downloaded to only six
devices associated with one Amazon account. And periodical
subscriptions are not shareable at all, overturning traditional
ownership notions. The Nook does allow book sharing with
friends, but only for a fortnight and a given title can be lent
out only once. So there! Amazon has gone to great lengths
to monitor geographical sale restrictions on books and the
device by enlisting the help of the location tracking service
Quova. You can buy a Kindle in Congo, but not in China,
considered a hub of software piracy. And in a chilling episode
for which it later apologized, Amazon remotely deleted
copies of George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm from the Kindle
devices of readers who had bought them, saying its digital
publication was discovered as a rights violation. No
permission was sought from customers, although they were
provided with a refund. Truly Orwellian!

All these may paradoxically reassure traditional publishers,

but they remain extremely wary of digitization doing a
Napster on the book industry. For the moment, however,
they are willing to bet on eBooks and their promise of
redemption.

e.o.m