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The Over-Saturated E-Reader Market

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Okay, I’m calling this. I don’t know what’s happening with the e-reader market, but I’m 100% sure there are too many participants. Has this ever happened before with emerging tech? Were there fifty different MP3 players before Apple begat the iPod?

Today’s entrant is none other than Creative, known to long-time PC aficionados for their sound technology, and more recently sundry miscellaneous gadgets. Their impending e-reader is called the Mediabook, and unlike the kindle it:

will harness “videos, pictures, text, and services in one device that supports a media-rich experience.”

Which means it won’t be a dedicated e-reader, but some sort of hyrbrid iPhone-ish-netbook-like hand-held computer gizmo. But isn’t this really inevitable? Just as all SUV’s invariably morph into egg-shaped station wagons when gas mileage becomes an issue, all task-specific devices like the Kindle are going to keep drifting back to the hand-held computer model where all-in-one functionality is critical.

The biggest concern I have is that all of these developers are going to blow it. They’re going to go feature crazy and forget that the race to develop a digital book on par with an actual book has not been won — not even close. If that happens, gadget sales go up, e-book sales go flat or down, and everybody forgets (again) that text is still a big deal in the entertainment business. And education business. And newspaper business.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy who runs the local service station is putting together his own e-reader, to be given away with every full tank. And I hear the Girl Scouts are going to be selling one along with their cookies. Can Nintendo be far behind? What about PlaySkool? And where is Boeing on this? If you can build a 7X7, can’t you build an e-reader?

— Mark Barrett

Suspension of Disbelief Revisited

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Earlier today the following quote appeared on Twitter (via Guy Charles and others), regarding Jane Friedman’s keynote interview at PBV:

Friedman on enhanced ebooks: “Vook is read and watch… I’m not interested in disrupting the reading experience; it’s sacrosanct.”

By coincidence, I ran across the following quote at almost the same moment while doing research for the previous post:

There are plenty of people who cringe at the cultural toll, who believe that the loss of books means losing the tactile, absorbing relationship with text we’ve enjoyed for centuries. MIT technology guru Nicholas Negroponte would like to remind them that people resisted indoor plumbing, too.

“They complained that if women didn’t do the laundry beside the river and at the fountain they would be alone, but other things started to serve those social purposes,’’ said Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child program, a festival panelist, and Deborah Porter’s significant other. “The reading experience is becoming more social. There are various ways of interacting on e-readers or computers, where people blog and use Twitter, and where the sharp line between the writer and the reader is going away.’’

I understand both of these perspectives, but relative to the functional merits of books they are both wrong, and both wrong for the same reason.  [ Read more ]

The Bigger Picture

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CNET’s interview of Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne, has attracted understandable interest over the past few days. Garland talks turkey and sense about how the internet will inevitably impact the movie business, just as it has the music and publishing industries:

What will happen is the studios will exhaust every available remedy and there will be a series of evolutions, meaning they will exhaust one remedy and a new one will present itself. These things will be pursued in tandem. They will pursue technological intervention on the Internet. This goes to the study at NYU that basically says this has had no effect. Ultimately, because they are spending a lot of money and not getting results, they’ll become disillusioned with these vendors. They’ll clean house. But something else will present itself.

I think he’s right about where we are, and I think he’s right about where we’re going in the future, but I think he and almost everyone else stop short of where we’re ultimately headed. And I’m not saying that as a criticism: Garland properly frames his comments in the context of survivability, not ultimate truth. The goal is getting your industry through the transition, after which things will of course continue to evolve.

Still, I think the lines of convergence are pretty clear, even if they still resolve over the horizon. Everything people think they know about the internet is predicated on a set of relatively arbitrary decisions. Net neutrality is one instance, anonymity is another. Flip a couple of simple switches and suddenly the internet doesn’t look like the wild west or a commune, it looks like Big Brother or a corporate bureaucracy.  [ Read more ]

Dell As Predator

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Every once in a while I do a survey of the PC landscape to see what’s selling and what’s changed. In the heyday of the personal computer tech advances were routinely amazing. Today, computers are lifeless commodities, differentiated more by colors on laptop lids than by anything inside. And that’s fine: there was really only one performance requirement for computers, and that was that they be able to do what we want them to do without having to wait for anything to spool up or refresh or crunch. Now we’re there.

As with all else these days, this commoditization has put tremendous price pressure on manufacturers. While Apple still commands a premium because of its snob appeal, everything else is being squeezed to the nth degree. (I configured a couple of PC’s last night, and on one I had the option of upgrading my hard drive by 500GB for $39.) Margins are shrinking to nano levels, meaning corporate profits must be driven elsewhere. Which brings me to Dell.  [ Read more ]

On the Origin of Rewriting

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Every young writer should see this (via if:book), but you’ll be fascinated, too. (Ben Fry’s presentation is wonderful.)

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime. The first English edition was approximately 150,000 words and the sixth is a much larger 190,000 words. In the changes are refinements and shifts in ideas — whether increasing the weight of a statement, adding details, or even a change in the idea itself.

I have good friends who were afflicted early-on — thanks to the assistance of ignorant parents and teachers — with an unshakable belief that great words flow unbidden from great minds. When these friends fail to execute a bit of writing at the moment of conception they take it as a sign of failure, if not inherent failing in themselves.

My own experience as a writer and as a student of writing is that great words are a torment and struggle for all writers on all but the rarest of days. I have met no Mozarts in Literature, writing whole scores with no erasures. I have met and read only hard-working writers who know that the first draft is exactly that.

We walk with a skeleton designed for effortless walking.

Our minds were not designed for effortless poetry and prose.

— Mark Barrett

The DIY Author

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Found a funny New Yorker piece on Twitter yesterday. Good for a laugh all the way through, but this (small spoiler/tease) was priceless:

We can send you a list of bookstores in your area once you fill out the My Local Bookstores list on your Author’s Questionnaire.

Worthy of Heller.

— Mark Barrett

Ten (Non-fiction) Reads

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When I was writing screenplays I watched a lot of movies. Binges of them. Blackout binges.

When I’m working on interactive titles I tend to play games obsessively and read up on the latest failed attempts at interactive storytelling.

What’s been really enjoyable about turning toward the publishing industry over the past few months is that I’ve re-established a long-lost love affair with the New Books shelf at the local library. In doing so I’ve worked my way through a surprising number of books, and I’d like to pass along* the titles** of the ones that stuck with me.  [ Read more ]

The E-Reader Technology Question

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I’ve stumbled across a few posts recently about e-readers and how they compare to books. The overwhelming consensus is that e-readers aren’t there yet, but this rather obvious observation seems to be leading people to two completely wrong conclusions.

One group of people are concluding from the current technological shortfall that books will always be better than technology, therefore there will always be a need for books. Well, no…and yes.  [ Read more ]

The Coaching Encyclopedia

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I had no idea there was anything called a book coach. (Obviously this says something about my own impoverished imagination and lack of initiative, but for equally obvious reasons I would prefer not to dwell on those subjects.)

And I have to say, the questions being asked by the book coach at the other end of the above link are good questions. But I’m still stuck on the idea that book coaches even exist, and I can tell I’m not going to be able to shake free of this new obsession before this post ends.  [ Read more ]