I spend a lot of time reading. Which I guess puts me in the minority these days. With 1000 cable channels, YouTube and Podcasts there seems to be little point. But I have noticed that there is something important about reading.
When I read, my mind is active and at work. Watching a show or video is basically mindless. Reading is enjoyable, however, it is also rather inconvenient. Carrying around books everywhere is not an easy thing to do. Being a fan of eBooks, I read content in PDFs constantly and have had a subscription to O’Reilly’s Safari for years. Paper is pointless, it’s cumbersome, and heavy (I’ll spare you the joke about it being made of wood). The other problem with paper is, well, it’s unsearchable.
So, today I decided to give eReader a try on my iPhone. This is how it should work. I would read more if reading a book is as easy as listening to a podcast, or watching a TV Show. Now it is. I just need more content. The ability to take a book with me everywhere, is very appealing. To have it on my iPhone, on a screen that is readable (something not as pleasant on my old Treo) is incredibly powerful.
My major problem with this is that there needs to be more of a market. People need to read more. I’m currently reading Dean Koontz’s From the Corner of His Eye. I have it in paperback and went ahead and purchased it in eReader to give it a try. The iPhone is backlit so I don’t have to have a light to read in the dark. There is no need to carry the book in my bag. It remembers where I am in the book for me so no bookmarks to worry about loosing or falling out.
However, there are disadvantages. Whereas the reader is free, the books aren’t. I’m perfectly ok with paying for the content, however, the price seems quite high. This book was $6.27 on eReader.com. The price on the book at the book store wasn’t much less than that, discounted. However, electronic books are cheaper to reproduce than their paper counterparts. To copy a paper book involves physical resources and machinery. Copying an eBook does not require the same physical investment. Some CPU time and a virtually miniscule amount of storage space.
Another problem with eBooks is what to do with them when I’ve read them. Some books I want to read over and over, like say my Programming Ruby book. However, some books, like this one by Dean Koontz are of no use to me after I have read it. But unlike a physical paperback book which I can take to a used bookstore or sell on Amazon or eBay. I can’t do that with an eBook because they are tied to my credit card and I’m not giving that out to just anyone. So I’m not really paying for the book, I’m paying for the right to read the book. In this day and age, let’s face it, publishers should be paying me to read their book, considering the amount of other things that I could be doing. I don’t expect that, but there is no reason that a book should cost 8 bucks.
This is my proposed solution, The iTunes Book Store. Books are $1.99 each, and have the same restrictions as an audio or video track. You can download them from iTunes and put them directly on the iPhone or iPod Touch. Use the Apple DRM and lock them down to a single account and let people print them off on their printer if they want. Of course, this would just make it even easier to over-load myself with content, but hey, bring it on.
