What's inside the evrit reader?

[guy keren]

Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Sun, May 30, 2010, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote about "Re: What's inside the evrit reader?":
>> IMHO I wouldn't recommend such a device until the price drops and we'll see
>> some competing products. There are competing products who are IIRC cheaper.
>> The books that Steimatzky will sells are fully DRM protected, you cannot
>> "loan" to anyone and vice-versa.
> 
> All of this would be fine if their business model was that of a library.
> After all, people don't normally check out books from a library and go to
> loan ("sublet") them to other people, and nobody would care if his rented
> book has any DRM on it - after all the all point of the eink display is that
> it will be much more convenient to read a book on it, not on a general-purpose
> computer.
> 
> But this is NOT their business-model. While they continue to pretend to be
> *selling* books for 44 shekels each, while not actually selling you all the
> normal rights you'd expect - I consider such a device worthless.
> Even if instead of 1400 shekels it would cost 400 shekels (and it won't,
> I don't see why everyone here is hoping for its price to significantly drop -
> they'll just have a new model that costs the same....)
> 
> I've been accumulating books for 35 years now, and CDs for 25 years now,
> and they are all still usable, for me and my family (and/or anyone I might
> choose to give them to). If they guarantee that I could do the same with
> ebooks that I "buy" from them, I'll agree to buy from them. Otherwise, this
> is not buying, it's renting, and I want to pay the much lower book-rental
> prices on the market (last time I checked, this was known as a "library", and
> didn't cost 44 shekels every time you checked out a book.)

the world is a-changing. as you know, the industry have not yet managed 
to completely adapt to the existence of the internet, and electronic 
media interchange.

at times of such changes, you should expect most companies to back off 
(and so they do), and a few to try to adapt. e-books are an attempt to 
adapt. it takes a while until business models stabilize around such 
fundamental changes. neither you nor i know how it will look, eventually.

just the way that in the paper-world there were books sales and there 
were book loans together - they may be several such models that will 
evolve around the internet.

personally, i tend to re-read the same book again and again in a period 
of much less then 10 years - so for me, a model that allows me to keep 
the book longer then a week or two (as is the case with libraries today) 
makes sense.

you should note that in the paper library model, books has to be 
returned fast, because the library couldn't keep unlimited number of 
copies of each book - all this logistics needed for a paper-library are 
not relevant to electronic libraries - and imposing such a model on 
electronic libraries will be artificial.

the same thing will happen with the keeping of books long-term. why do 
you keep a book on your shelf for years after you stopped reading them? 
because paper-books become out-of-print, and you know that if you won't 
keep it, - you might not be able to "get it again" in the future. this 
is not the situation with e-books - they will not run "out of print", 
and you know you'll be able to "get it again" in the future.

so the real problem you have now, is your ability (or lack of) to loan 
the book to friends or sell them as "used books". note that since they 
are not "used" - you should be able to sell them in list-price to anyone 
(perhaps a little less - because the buyer has to work harder to buy the 
book from you, then to buy it from an online reseller - until someone 
will build a "used e-books market" web site). i don't see exactly how to 
overcome this, without 'ruining' the industry (with the used-paper-books 
market, people had an incentive to buy the new book from the publisher 
rather then the used book, both due to convenience, and because the new 
book was in a better condition). by the way, i won't be surprised if 
originally, selling used books was considered illegal ;)

look at the parallel market - the proprietary software market - selling 
used software is deemed illegal according to many software licenses (and 
the fact it, the software is not sold - only the license to use it). and 
yet people live with this market for a long time - although very many 
people break the law daily - which shows the model is not working too 
well. but then again - radio-tapes and radio-disks in cars were stolen 
in large percentages for years - and still no one thought the underlying 
model should be changed :0

--guy