Musings of a Marketing Maven

Today’s Wall Street Jour­nal fea­tured an in-depth arti­cle about the poten­tial dis­rup­tive impact of dig­i­tal books and e-book devices. (The author touched on impli­ca­tions for new pric­ing schemes and busi­ness mod­els for the pub­lish­ing indus­try, but that’s not the sub­ject of this post.) The ques­tion is, should book lovers like me switch over to e-book read­ers like Kin­dle 2, or should we wait for the next gen­er­a­tion of devices?

The jury’s out.

Time for con­fes­sion: I’ve been a book lover all my life. I’m pas­sion­ate about a well-told tale, and love brows­ing inde­pen­dent book­stores and the local pub­lic library. Rel­a­tive to most Amer­i­cans, I spend a for­tune on books, both fic­tion and non­fic­tion. In any given year I read hun­dreds of books, thanks to early train­ing in speed read­ing. But I don’t yet own a Kin­dle or a Sony e-book device. Their value propo­si­tions aren’t suf­fi­ciently com­pelling, at least not yet.

To me the pri­mary ben­e­fits of dig­i­tal books are con­ve­nience, porta­bil­ity and search­a­bil­ity – func­tional, util­i­tar­ian ben­e­fits. Where’s the joy?

Like most peo­ple I read books for a vari­ety of reasons:

• Plea­sure: the desire to be cap­ti­vated by a well-told tale or enthralled by an inter­est­ing and com­plex set of char­ac­ters (e.g., Pos­ses­sion)
• Curios­ity: an inter­est in learn­ing about peo­ple and cul­tures, places, his­tor­i­cal fig­ures or times in his­tory that are way out­side my per­sonal expe­ri­ence (e.g., Three Cups of Tea or The Girls of Riyadh)
• Dis­trac­tion: a way to pass the time on a long flight (e.g., The DaVinci Code)
• Thirst for knowl­edge: a way to learn new the­o­ries, con­cepts or mod­els that might ben­e­fit my per­sonal or pro­fes­sional life (e.g., The Tip­ping Point, Groundswell, etc.)
• Guid­ance or self-help: a way to learn new skills or con­tem­plate behav­ior changes (e.g., Yoga Anatomy or The Not So Big Life)
• Busi­ness: ref­er­ence sources that relate to spe­cific areas of exper­tise (e.g., Mar­ket­ing Met­rics)

I under­stand the con­ve­nience of dig­i­tal books for ref­er­ence pur­poses, such as travel guide­books or busi­ness books that I might want to con­sult on a reg­u­lar basis. In those cases search­a­bil­ity is a real ben­e­fit. I can also imag­ine what might hap­pen if e-book read­ers had built-in GPS devices, to help find cur­rent restau­rant or movie reviews that are linked to the device’s cur­rent location.

But even so…

Today’s Devices Require Too Many Compromises

For me devices like the Kin­dle 2 still require too much of a com­pro­mise: you lose the tac­tile and aes­thetic expe­ri­ence of a well-designed book. Books dis­trib­uted via the Kin­dle 2 must sac­ri­fice the author or editor’s intent for typog­ra­phy, design and page lay­out in favor of search­a­bil­ity, porta­bil­ity and the require­ment to offer scal­able font sizes for peo­ple with vision challenges.

Given the device’s limit of 16 shades of grey, com­plex illus­tra­tions and typog­ra­phy must be com­pro­mised. The screen is still way too small. Yes, you can install doc­u­ments in PDF for­mat (via con­ver­sion), but I find myself won­der­ing whether in doing so, you lose the fidelity of the designed page when you make that conversion.

Will Next Gen Devices Hit the Sweet Spot?

I under­stand from online gos­sip that the next Kin­dle will offer a larger screen (just under 10 inches). I won­der how many shades of grey it will sup­port; whether its screen res­o­lu­tion will be bet­ter than today’s 150–167 dpi lim­i­ta­tions (what­ever the actual details).

Based on my expe­ri­ence 20 years ago with the desk­top pub­lish­ing rev­o­lu­tion, I know that the qual­ity of the read­ing expe­ri­ence will improve enor­mously once the tech­nol­ogy affords 256 shades of grey and improved screen res­o­lu­tions (closer to 300 dpi). And a page size that approx­i­mates a 1:1 ratio with the orig­i­nal page layout.

I can imag­ine buy­ing dig­i­tal books when e-book reader devices impose fewer con­straints on book design: no sac­ri­fices in page and chap­ter lay­out, typog­ra­phy, illus­tra­tion fidelity, etc. I don’t require color, but I do want high-fidelity grey scale.

It’s pos­si­ble that the next gen­er­a­tion e-books, given larger screen sizes and improved res­o­lu­tion, will hit the sweet spot — when my moti­va­tion is business-related or util­i­tar­ian, i.e., when seek­ing infor­ma­tion like maps and travel guides, restau­rant reviews, news­pa­per arti­cles, blogs, etc. I can also under­stand the appeal of e-books for in-the-moment dis­trac­tion while wait­ing in line, or pass­ing time on a cross-country flight. For those sit­u­a­tions I’d be will­ing to give up the tac­tile joys of hold­ing a book and turn­ing pages in favor of the option of car­ry­ing lots of books “inside” a device that weighs less than a pound.

It would be nice to have my entire library “at my fin­ger­tips” – fully search­able — but it’s hard to imag­ine that Ama­zon would ever offer a pric­ing model that would make that afford­ably attrac­tive. Not for some­one like me who already owns hun­dreds, if not thou­sands, of books. Amazon’s pric­ing model to add dig­i­tal rights to the cost of a printed book (when pur­chased one at a time) is still too high a delta to pay for a sin­gle book, let alone large num­bers of books.

Net net: for some­one like me the devices aren’t yet good enough.

Print PDF