Slightly off topic - Ebooks

[dsr-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 12:08:51AM -0500, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> > Yes. Don't buy DRM'd books. Wait for another year or so; the
> > market will sort itself out, and the hardware will get better
> > and cheaper.
> 
> This is really the comment I'm curious about.  Why do you say "don't buy drm
> books?"  What do you think will change in the next year, and what bad thing
> do you think will happen, if you buy drm'd books within the next year?

The "bad thing" is licensing DRM'd books; it's already here.  Publishers
are going to either move to DRM-free ebooks or find themselves doing
too much work for too little return. As customers grow more savvy about
ebooks, they will express a preference for non-DRM'd ebooks. One of
the factors driving that will be a desire to avoid lock-in. When you
change ebook readers, your library will need to move with you, even
across manufacturers.

Will you grant me that in the timeframe of the next decade, Moore's Law
will continue to generally hold? That is, solid-state electronics of a
given capacity will get cheaper, or you'll be able to buy more capacity
for the same money?

Given that, the price of ebook readers will drop substantially.  Right
now, we're at a stage similar to that of PDAs when Palm introduced the
Palm Pilot III: a decent form factor and decent software at a price that
people start to see as reasonable for the functions performed. But in the
near future, the displays which were expensive and small and power-hungry
(if you wanted color) became cheap and larger and higher-resolution and
more efficient.

There's only one supplier of e-Ink screens right now. This will change.

e-Ink is monochrome except for prototypes now. This will change.

e-Ink doesn't react fast enough for video display. This might change
through improvements to e-Ink, or it might change through the development
of some other display technology.

Capacitative touchscreens are expensive right now. This will change.

Battery technology is always improving.

Processor technology is always improving. Ditto solid-state storage.

A few years from now, you will consider a gray-scale, page-flickering,
non-video-playing, limited web-browsing ebook with connectivity locked
to one store to be hopelessly behind the times.

Incidentally, I also expect that 3G and similar long-distance wireless
data schemes will not be a standard feature. Instead, most ebook readers
will talk to your cellphone over BlueTooth or something similar.

-dsr-

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