Why has dedicated e-reader hardware failed to succeed in the marketplace? Would appreciate your thoughts. Gloria Whitaker-Daniels
The quick answer is, I think, that books are just too good -- too cheap, too convenient, too easy to use. People don't want to pay a lot for an electronic device that does the same job worse. Also, dedicated screen readers have to compete with other electronic devices that can do the same job. In the mobile market, that includes PDAs, mobile phones and some media players.
Then there are the ancilliary problems of file formats, copy protection and prices. CDs are popular because they are portable, can be experienced in numerous situations (home hi-fi, clock radio in bedroom or kitchen, in car, portable player etc), can be ripped or copied, loaned to friends, and re-sold on eBay. Most commercial electronic texts are much more limited in all these areas.
However, even when people have quite a good free screen reader (eg in a Pocket PC running Microsoft Windows CE) and access to free texts (Gutenberg etc), they don't use them much, or at all.
So, the only real potential I can see for dedicated screen readers would be their adoption as standard by libraries, and by publishers supplying libraries with electronic books (eg in PDF format) and magazines instead of paper ones. This could be brought in as a replacement for microfiche, and would allow pay-per-page reading and book printing on demand.
Online did run a cover story, Library without books, on Sony's LIBRIe ebook reader on Thursday April 22, 2004.
I also wrote an Online cover story, The e-book: and now a new chapter begins, published on Thursday October 12, 2000.
Further information is available from The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), formerly the Open eBook Forum (OeBF). This is the trade and standards association for the digital publishing industry. See: http://www.idpf.org/
