Michael Hart: eBook readers will not be a major factor in eBook reading, ever

The reason is the same as always:

Dedicated products never sell as well as ones a company puts out that have multiple function.

That is what expressed by Michael Hart, the e-book inventor, on a recent post on PG-News: “Why The Inventor Of eBooks Says kindle Won’t Go“.

He identifues some reasons people will not buy a dedicated eBook reader:

1. the new generations are used to screens the size of Nintendo GameBoys, grew up on them.
2. the new generations also think screens on cell phones are just fine, and most of those are now even larger.
3. the new generations have always got the paperback editions as much as the hardbacks, so they don’t have the same nostalgia for Look And Feel of those as do people who stared reading a while before paperbacks became very acceptable. Fourth, Fifth, etc. the alternatives. . . .
4. most people don’t realize it, but many cell phones also come with WiFi built in so the unit is basically a small kindle to start with! You don’t even have to have the phone activated to use the WiFi functions, which usually have a pretty normal browser, text reader, and such in them to start with, and also accept any numbers of third party programs most eBook readers have already heard of, no need for me to pitch them.
5. many PDAs are also available that do an awful lot of the same things described above at a much lower cost than a kindle, Sony, etc.
6. if the largest cell phone screens would not do, even the iPhone, Curve, etc., there are all the new netbooks coming out that should get the job done in any number of ways as far as an eBook presentation goes, from reading out loud, dozens of programs to choose from to read or to listen via text to speech, etc.
7. in all the history of electronics the dedicated products, those that do only one good thing, rather than the integrated products, are never known to sell very well. It’s like buying a HiFi that has one box for FM and one for AM, another as a pre-amplifier, and another as an amplifier, another bass or treble controls box, etc., versus one box for all. Why would someone spend the same amount of cash on a kindle/Sony as on a netbook or a laptop? The kindle isn’t portable enough to be the more take along kind of item than a netbook/laptop. It would appear that ONLY the person who has an awful time reading would want a kindle, simply, and truly, just because of the variable fonts & and the new X2 being about to read out loud, or the kind of person who just wants to have a lot of the latest toys and doesn’t care about price to benefits ratios and the like.
8. there are simply not enough Kindles to really change the eBook environment. If every person who has a kindle or a Sony buys the same book, only by adding their combination of sales will they manage a million seller, and that is not likely to happen anytime soon.

He has raised some questions:

• How long before Amazon or Sony comes out with a new model that won’t read all the previous book entries on the old models?
• How long before the first kindle and first Sony are antique collector items rather than a real, live and well-used eBook reader?
• Is anyone even going to pretend that kindle and Sony will even read their own proprietary files 38 years from 2009?

And he explains:  plain vanilla ASCII files on hundreds or thousands of sites around the world will still be readable 38 years from now. . .

So. what do you do if you own a dedicated e-book reader?

With Sony, kindle, and the others, you never do really know what books will be available on the next iteration of their book lists, they come & they go, even though they say no reason to ever delete an eBook, it happens all too frequently, so my recommendation is to always make backups. If they don’t allow backups try to make “IMAGE” backups such as “Ghost” and the like, that copy all the 1’s and 0’s directly without files, and file permissions, and all that jazz.

His take on kindle sales figures with respect to a Techcrunch article:

Perhaps at the end of this year we are going to hear one of them sold a million, given all the various versions as a grand total.

This, of course is stark contrast to 10 million iPhones sold per year, even more Curves at this very moment are going out, with the grand total of cell phones approaching 4.5 million now.

If 1/10 of iPhone users read eBooks, that’s new readers at the rate of a million per year, lots more than the total number of Kindles sold.

As of this time last year, August 1, 2008, just under 1/4 million Kindles had been sold. If we figure sales have doubled in the past year, the current total would be approaching 3/4 million, by August of 2009. . .or if tripled, they might be approaching a million. Amazon makes it hard to say, unless you get insider information as a report specifying the above figure did.

This same article says the total Kindles out in the world will just pass 2/3 million in 2009.

If 1/1000 of the 4.5 billion cell phones are in use as eBook readers, that is 4.5 million, many more than kindle and Sony combined are thinking about for at least a couple more years.

And here he concludes:

So far, it would appear that eBook readers will not be a major factor in eBook reading, ever.

If just 1% of the billion plus computers should be used as eBook readers, that’s 10 million.

Michael has some valid points in his discussion. E-book community should think deeply about the issue. However, Michael is looking the whole issue of dedicated devices without looking at the business side of the e-book market. E-book market is still in it’s nascent stage. And book publishers are trying to find ways to keep their business running. Amazon and sony are part of the business game.

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