The End of the Ebook?

Kindle Ebook ReaderYesterday I had a debate with my friend Ryan about the future of ebooks.

I had just uploaded my audio and PDF transcript and was seeing subscribers coming along nicely. I was suggesting the same tactic for another project we were working on together.

You might already know, I am a big fan of ebooks. I buy them, I read them, I give them away, I even plan to sell them.

Free EbookRyan doesn’t believe in them. He thinks bloggers should do series posts instead. In fact, he doubts ebooks have much of a future.

I can see his point. Ebooks are about reading a large amount of material in one package. Most I imagine get read online rather than printed out or downloaded to a reading device such as Amazons Kindle.

Then look at prominent bloggers such as Aaron Wall and Brian Clark, their content has been turned into member sites rather than ebooks. Aaron in particular is surprising as for years he made a good income out of his SEOBook but now his content is delivered as an SEO Training Course.

It is easy to see the attraction of a member site for content producers. First off is obviously the recurring revenue. One sale versus monthly income. After that it is also about lifetime value, a one-off book purchase versus an ongoing relationship with all the opportunities that implies.

For the customer, with a member site you get not just words and pictures but video, audio, discussion, web conferencing, chat, and maybe tools and utilities also. An ebook is capable of more than words and pictures but rarely is.

The downsides to ebook delivery is clear also. Ebooks are routinely copied and shared, it is so easy to do and largely untraceable. The more people try to prevent it, the more damage is done to legitimate customers by applying restrictive DRM and other draconian measures.

Is this the beginning of the end for the humble ebook or is there life in the old dog yet?

Please share your thoughts in the comments …

Posted on March 18, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Content Licensing, PDF, Video Tutorials

Comments

8 Responses to “The End of the Ebook?”

  1. Dean on March 18th, 2008 2:32 pm

    Personally I’m torn on ebooks, I find it difficult to read a whole book from the screen. But as a reference tool they are great, to drop in and search through.

    Personally (and I know this sounds dumb) but I get frustrated with a printed book when I can’t hit CTRL+F and find the text I’m looking for. Amazing how you take things for granted isn’t it?

  2. Chris Garrett on March 18th, 2008 2:37 pm

    Yeah searching is a good aspect to ebooks. Never tried to search a print book though ;)

  3. Brad K. on March 18th, 2008 5:16 pm

    I think ebooks miss the point.

    In order to compete with printed material, ebooks need to be more portable, simple to lay aside while you check a different reference, bookmark your place, dog-ear the interesting pages, highlight and make notes. Some books remind the owner ‘remember me’ with a distinctive cover, being shelved next to (dozens to hundreds) of other books. The owner adds a lot of value to a printed book, both by adding to the book (or removing unwanted stuff) and by the way the object is stored and handled.

    ebook readers were late getting into mass adoption. They are still relatively confined to computers, which restricts the audience to those comfortable spending reading time at the computer, and those that casually keep laptops with them.

    That said, I think there is room for a ‘captured blog’ format. Some blogs benefit enormously from community contribution - ebooks seldom provide the diverse discussion that occasionally makes blog comment sections so valuable. A collection of blog posts, with comments intact, would be of interest. Add a table of contents, search, index contributors and topics. The result would not be confused with literature, and might start looking like the rough start of a blog-into-ebook. The value would be the editing - selecting and organizing the blog sequence - and the amenities added.

    There is probably also room for an automatically updated app - take the above collection, and update with comments added over time. The comments could contain the domains cited by commentors, adding value even to many of the ‘Good Post!’ fluff. An appendix could do a short bio on commentors, where the info is available and pertinent.

    The current ebook concept suffers from lack of editing expertise. Just as audio books often sell better depending on the voice talent, ebooks should include who did the document workup and polish. Right now there is no one to advise the author ‘do some more work before you try to release this.’ And many ebooks suffer - as does the image of ebooks for being short, repetitive, and middling content value.

    Glad you asked!

  4. Guilherme Zühlke O'Connor on March 18th, 2008 5:20 pm

    @Chris - In a way I already did it.

    I noticed how frustrating was not having CTRL+F in paper books in college, more or less at the same time I became addict to “The Index” at the end of the books.

    CTRL+F is still better, though.

  5. Gideon on March 18th, 2008 7:15 pm

    I think there is definitely a future for the ebook, whether that same future is tied to blogbooks, I don’t know.

    I’ve been using a Kindle for a couple of months now, and it is one of the single greatest pieces of technology I’ve ever used. The text is supurbly readable, the device is very mobile, I have an enormous amount of content at my disposal and can annotate, highlight, and bookmark as I see fit.

    I also get the NY Times every morning, something hard to pull off on the barren cultural wastes of the Midwest.

    That being said, I don’t subscribe to any blogs via it. Blogs “work” on a computer because they are brief, and while I read an enormous amount of feeds I don’t want to read anything too long on a computer screen. This includes ebooks.

    But an eBook on an eInk screen is an entirely different thing. It’s easier than a book in many ways.

  6. Donald Brown on March 18th, 2008 10:42 pm

    The traditional ebook has a lot to be desired, but it still has its place even today. However, I have been working on a really nifty project called Ebook By Blog, and what it is, is an ebook that is generated out of a blog. I have used the standard executable ebook format that people had used before PDF ebooks really started taking over.

    The idea of making a blog an ebook is great because the ebook si never complete, plus other people can write in it and leave their two cents worth.

    I am offering my Ebook By Blog ebook free of charge. Anyone can get it if they want it by clicking here below.

    Download Ebook By Blog

    I don’t think that ebooks are dead, nor do I think that they will ever die, not when there is the ability to add multi-media to them such as audio, video and anything else that you can possibly think of. Now that the blog is here to stay, they too can become full-blown information products too.

    Of course, the really nice thing about using a blog as an ebook, is that you don’t ahve to end up cluttering up people’s hard drives with a lot of bits and bytes. All they have to do, is to simply download a very small executable file that is linked to the Internet and to their blog, and then they will be able to read the information online right from inside the executable ebook format. Pretty nifty huh?

    I have been an ebook author for quite some time now, and I have seen many things come and go, but I still see two main formats, the executable format and the PDF format being the main ebook formats to date. Of course, video is really taking hold on the Internet, but that too can be implemented into ebooks with no problem whatsoever. The same goes for audio, flash and anything else that you can possibly think of.

    I personally love ebooks and I love reading them on my computer screen. I also love creating them as well, and I have several ebook compilers on my hard drive, including a number of PDF creation tools too.

  7. Chris Garrett on March 19th, 2008 12:10 am

    @Brad - I think ebooks are superior in one area, the delivery, as Gideon shows. A good editor is a very valuable asset though :)

    @Guilherme - I’m a cover to cover reader :)

    @Donald - I have never got on with the executable ebooks (if you mean .exe ebooks) because they have been given a bad name through the amount of “free” software that are merely trojans and find that they are rarely mac compatible anyway. Do you find you have to overcome a lot of objections to their use?

  8. Jack on July 7th, 2008 6:39 am

    Hello all, I find ebooks to be of great help in every aspect to be comfortable with, ebook is version choiced by millions of people around the world, but depending on kindle reader its quality people decide for some ebooks from a specified publisher, published by a good company, managing quality conversion guidelines…We all my colleagues have been taking help from itglobalsolution, Supremus Group……….Thanks

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