An iPod for eBooks?24 November 2003 I don't always have a good idea for these columns in time to write them. Last week I found myself sitting at a friend's dining room table on Friday night, knowing full well I had no column written for this week. I am working on a piece about the Free Trade Area of the Americas treaty, which would force all 34 North and South American democracies to pass "Super DMCA" laws, but it needs more seasoning. So there I sat, no column and at least 20 hours at the store before my Monday morning deadline. And then, as so often happens, I got a topic handed to me on a silver platter. The reason I was at my friend's house is that he was hosting our biweekly writer's critique meeting. After we finished talking writing technique, we turned to ebooks. My friend is a die-hard Apple fanatic, and broached the idea of an iPod for ebooks. For those that have been living under a rock for the past year, the iPod is Apple's runaway success media player. Smaller than a deck of cards, the iPod sports a 10, 20 or 40GB hard drive (enough for 2,500, 5,000 or 10,000 songs, respectively), fast FireWire connectivity to either a Mac or PC, dead simple touch-sensitive controls and rock solid reliability. The iPod accounts for nearly 75% of the MP3 player market. But what really spurred iPod sales into the stratosphere was iTunes and the iTunes Music Store. iTunes, available for the Mac and Windows, is one of the easiest ways to rip from CD and organize your music collection. It's also the portal to the Music Store, where you can buy songs from all five of the major recording labels and many of the independents for a buck a song. Once you have the music, you can transfer it to an iPod, burn it to as many CDs as you want, pretty much do whatever you want with it. This combination of reasonably priced and easily available music along with simple conversion of music you already own makes the iPod/iTunes combination a knockout for mobile music. I have friends that keep practically their entire music collections on their iPods, so they can listen to any of their stuff at any time. What does this have to do with ebooks? My friend brought up the idea that if someone were to make something that worked as well and as simply as the iPod, but for ebooks, he'd buy it in a second. I was surprised when he started describing a dedicated ebook reader, without any PDA or Tablet functionality. eBay is littered with dedicated readers that didn't work, and all those that bought Franklin eBookMans, Rocket eBooks and SoftBooks have felt the crash of dedicated readers. Conventional wisdom says that people don't want to carry yet another gadget around (in addition to a cell phone, iPod, PDA, GPS or any combination thereof), and that by the time you've put in a readable screen, the price of a dedicated reader is close enough to a multifunction device like a PDA that you may as well make it a PDA. My friend went on to make a compelling case, and I (who have ranted at length in the past about the futility of dedicated ebook readers) started to wonder, is the conventional wisdom wrong? Have dedicated ebook readers not worked not because they're based on a bad idea, but because no one's done them right? My friend described the perfect reader like this. It's about the size and shape of a commercial movie DVD case, roughly 4x6 inches, half an inch thick. The vast majority of the front is the screen. The screen doesn't have to be color, but it should be high contrast and relatively high resolution, 150-200 pixels per inch or so. The screen doesn't have to be a touch screen, but it would be nice for annotations. A scroll wheel (or dual wheels, one on each side for lefties or righties) would sit on the edge for easy page turning. A rechargeable lithium-polymer battery could power it for a week or so, reading a few hours a day. Figure 20-25 hours battery life, not out of the question given a monochrome screen and the size of the device. So far, it sounds a lot like a Rocket eBook, updated a bit to 2003 technology. But he went on to describe stuff that the Rocket didn't have, or didn't have for long. First off, this reader would be designed to handle unsecured content in the major formats: ASCII text, HTML, RTF, etc. I'd add PalmDoc, MobiPocket and Palm Reader formats to that list, since there's already so much content out there in those formats. It would also be able to add new content on the go, perhaps via WiFi (802.11b). It would be cool to be able to walk into the airport Starbucks and download a new book to read on the plane. My friend said he'd pay $300-400 for such a device, and I think that's a reasonable price that wouldn't have to be subsidized by "walled garden" content. The problem with many dedicated readers of the past is that the hardware was often sold at a loss (though still to expensive for the average consumer) with the expectation that selling books would compensate the loss. In this case, there's no need for the hardware maker to be a bookseller, too. Steve Jobs freely admits that the iTunes Music Store just about breaks even, but it's a great way to sell more iPods. Someone making this reader (What would we call it? "iBook" is already taken…) would be able to make a profit just selling the hardware, and the hardware would be easier to sell given all the content already available for it. The big question is, who would make such a device? Surprisingly, the answer might be Microsoft. Windows CE.net (the same engine that powers current Pocket PCs and Smartphones) would be perfect for this kind of device. Microsoft Reader already exists for it, as does Palm Reader, MobiPocket and perhaps most importantly, µBook (which would provide the ASCII, HTML and RTF engines). Windows CE also supports the power management and wireless networking that such a device would need. I think it's telling that Microsoft's own Chief Technology Officer doesn't carry a Pocket PC or a Smartphone, preferring to tote a Blackberry and an iPod. Both of these devices are more limited in scope than their Windows-Powered competition, but they do what they do (wireless email and music, respectively) supremely well. Is Microsoft starting to lean towards more specialized devices, all tied together in a Bluetooth PAN and doing their own thing? It's possible, and I'd like to see what Redmond might do with this idea. Is that enough, though? Would cool hardware tuned to display books wonderfully at the cost of doing nothing else coupled with inexpensive, no-strings-attached content be enough to make this hypothetical device do for books what the iPod did for music? Would "normal" people read ebooks if the experience really was as trouble free as paper? I'm not sure, and I'm not certain I'd ever buy such a device (for the same reason I continue to resist buying an iPod: my PDA does the same job, if not quite as well). But I'm also no longer certain the dedicated ebook reader is really dead. The concept might have one more comeback left. Jeff Kirvin
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