3 reasons why this whole "Apple's 'iPad' is the harbinger of the ebook revolution" thing is just speculation
Hey Post,
I've seen a lot of hype lately about how Apple's hypothetical "iPad" will change the book industry. Hell, O'Reilly wrote a piece on it today.
It's just wrong.
(And no, not in the way that "any speculation is bound to have some false-itude in it". It's wrong in the "they're basing their comparisons on incomparable situations" way.)
People talk about how Apple's iPod revolutionized how we listen to music. Damn right it did!
- It changed how we listen to music -- on machines smaller than our hands
- It changed where we listen to music -- literally, anywhere
- It changed the status of MP3s -- from "only crackpots could think this is legal" to "I'm buying my niece an iTunes gift card"
But dammit, it did this after people had already amassed a library of MP3s.
Don't get me wrong, I love Apple (I'm writing this on my MacBook Pro while listening to music from iTunes, and I can't wait to get the hard drive in my 160GB iPod Classic fixed). But all of this hype is hype-rbole. And here's why:
- There's no widespread ebook trade. I'd say that for every person downloading an ebook, there's 100 downloading a movie and 10,000 downloading an MP3.
- There's no such thing as an ebook library. Before iTunes, there were a ton of MP3 programs, duking it out for their share of people's $20 for the more "premium" shareware features. Hell, I remember re-installing this MusicMatch one a bunch of times, just because it handled my CDs the way I liked it to. iTunes -- and the music store -- jumped into a market that was ready for it.
- There's no way to digitize your existing books. I don't think MP3s would have exploded the way they did -- or as quickly as they did -- if there wasn't an easy way to make them. Until people are able to transfer their favourite hard-copy books into soft-copy ebooks, it'll be tough to convince people that they need this whole new library.
And yes, I know that Apple's App Store broke pretty much all of these rules. Except it didn't: people were jailbreaking their iPhones in order to install illegitimate applications. There was an existing market for these applications, though none as sophisticated as the App Store would be. And the App Store made a number of your favourite applications and websites mobile... it didn't make you start new accounts (at least, the good ones didn't).
I've said it here, and I'll say it again: until ebooks satisfy the three criteria above, the ebook market is a crap shoot. At best.
--Aidan
