Arbitrary Marks

The year was 2000 and I was just out of college, working for a subdivision of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Scarecrow Education. Many of the other employees were librarians, with degrees in Information Technology and Library Science. The hot topic in the office? Ebooks.

Ebooks were going to change the publishing business. It would take a couple of years, but soon we could transmit our texts electronically to users as they wanted to read them. We could even mark up the books using a stylus on the LCD screen and save the notes to another file. For very little overhead, we could make lots of money–a publisher’s dream, since books have to be printed on the hope that they will sell.

Um, yeah. This revolution never happened. For one thing, the technology (dial-up modems, serial ports and black and green screens) was clunky. The ebooks were heavy and there were competing sales models. Almost ten years later, the revolutionaries are back and heavy-hitting academic publishing companies like Yale are testing the waters.

In the last eight years, we’ve improved the technology of eBook readers: no more ucky black and green screens, faster downloads, lighter and more portable units. But will it be enough to take hold? Will academics–setting aside the general reader for a moment–ever look like the picture of Jean-Luc Picard in his study? Okay, some are already balding…

Well, many of us already have the MacBook Picard appears to use, but is there a benefit to having a Kindle as well? The cost of starting your Kindle experience is (right now) $359.99. Although the books don’t cost as much for publishers to create and put into an electronic format, you’re only going to save about $5-$10 compared to a print version.

I checked out the Kindle store at Amazon.com and clicked over to Non-Fiction > Philosophy. The first book that appeared? Wayne Dyer. Ugh. Checking out another level of detail, I browsed Philosophy > Epistemology. Some good classics there–Nagel, Kant, Hume, William James. Dummett’s Thought and Reality for $24.03 (print cost is $35.00); some Blackwell and Routledge texts, etc. Not bad. Of course, the Amazon.com results for the same category in print books returns 5,565 entries, compared to the 215 now on Kindle. So we’re looking at about 4% availability.

And that seems to be the problem–until more books are available, I think people will wait to drop $400 on a new piece of technology. And until there are more readers, publishing houses may be reticent to commit to a deal with Amazon. Further, we have the problem that it seems like Picard may have in the photo above–competing platforms. (Perhaps there’s another Star Trek universe explanation for the multiple eBook readers on the captain’s desk, so fill me in if you know of any!)

I would love to be an early adopter in the eBook market, but since I’ve watched this cycle before, I’m holding back. Not only is the price too high, but the possibility of investing in a platform only to have it be a dead end makes me want to be cautious. Ideally, my eBook reader would also hook up to academic journals and maybe–though I’m sure there would be copyright considerations–have a built-in scanner so I could import documents into it. Until I can share all of my documents between my laptop, bookshelf and eBook reader, these tools are of limited use to me.

The dream of taking my entire library to the coffee shop and working on my dissertation will have to wait.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Blogs/Technology, Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Email me at arbitrary [dot] marks [at] gmail [dot] com if you think a discussion should be re-opened.