eBooks can exist with...

[Walt_Crawford at notes.rlg.org]

I've been avoiding this thread because there's such a sense of deja vu,
but...

With regard to Larry Campbell's comments below, I don't see how you can
square:
"we're likely at the end of its era" with
"these are early days."
In 2001, I regard those as contradictory statements.

I've heard the "these are early days" argument for somewhat more than a
decade now. It was a LOT more convincing in 1991 than it is in 2001.

Back then, when pundits assured us that books, magazines, and newspapers
were goin' away any day now, you had the following:

*A situation in which dedicated ebook appliances would _not_ have been
competing with a huge base of quality notebook computers, a smaller base of
PDAs, and so on. (Note that most of this thread has been about ebook
appliances, not whether ebooks in other forms have roles.)

*An environment (at least in the mid-90s) in which venture capital for the
Next Great Thing was easier to come by.

*No good way to reduce the shipping/warehousing cost of midlist and
small-run books, while we now have Print-on-Demand [which represents the
huge majority of most so-called "ebook" business projections, even though
Print-on-Demand yields actual, bound, paper books]
---
In 1992, conventional wisdom was that any problems in the way of ebooks
inevitable success would be taken care of by the inexorable march of
technology within two years, including poor display resolution, the hassles
of backlighting, and limited battery life. I don't even hear the "within
two years" claim any more.

As of 2001, display resolution for commercially-practical devices has
improved by about 30% tops, you still can't produce a high-contrast
portable display that doesn't use transmitted light, and people now
understand that chemistry doesn't evolve at the same rate as digital
electronics, making battery life a continuing problem.

When you're more than a decade into a process and still talking about
"early days," it only makes sense if you're talking about a process that
will take several generations to have real impact. In which case, given
that mass-production/low-cost books and near-universal print literacy
haven't been around all that long (a century? less?), "at the end of its
era" is a considerable overstatement.

Am I predicting that no dedicated ebook appliance will ever succeed?
Absolutely not. I don't do predictions, and something like the GoBook could
still have a bright future in the textbook market (maybe). Am I agreeing
with others that there's less and less evidence that printed books are at
the end of their era? You got it. But then, I don't love printed books; I
just think they're great tools for some tasks.

Could there be some wholly unpredictable occurrence that will change all
this? Absolutely. Life is like that, sometimes.

-walt crawford, RLG, but my opinions-
----------------
Just now, Larry Campbell wrote:

>As someone who both loves the printed book, but believes we're likely at
>the end of its era, I'm sometimes unable to resist the temptation to
>respond to these kinds of dismissals. The simple fact of the matter is
>that these are early days. It may be, of course, that my hunch is wrong,
>and the appropriate analogy for the ebook as a device IS the 8-track tape;
>or, it may be that a better analogy would be the horseless carriage around
>the turn of the century. Then too many people no doubt felt there was
>nothing it could do that a horse couldn't do better. And they would have
>had justification -- just not foresight.