Bubble Bursts for E-Books

Yahoo! News - Reuters ^ | 10.10.03 | Paul Majendie

[mhking]

FRANKFURT, Germany (Reuters) - At the height of the Internet boom, e-books were hailed as the shining new tomorrow for publishers and paper books were heading for the scrap heap.

But the bubble has burst and electronic books are still the poor relation to the printed word with consumers preferring to turn the pages themselves when they curl up by the fire with a good book.

"The limitless euphoria of the beginning belongs to the past," said Arnoud de Kemp, a leading electronic publisher with the science and business media firm Springer.

Three years after the e-book frenzy reached its peak, publishers in Frankfurt for the world's biggest book fair of the year were in a much more realistic frame of mind.

Last month, top U.S. bookseller Barnes & Noble Inc announced it was halting e-book sales. "We did not see sales take off as we and many others had anticipated," a spokesman said.

Targets have been sharply lowered and now publishers look on e-books as a much smaller market which does still, admittedly from a very low starting point, see steady growth.

"Expectations were widely overblown at the time of the Internet bubble," said British publisher Helen Fraser, managing director at Penguin.

"But there is a small market for them and it may grow as different reading devices appear on the market. Sales do go up month by month," she told Reuters.

She said if Penguin sold 40,000 copies of a printed book, it would typically shift 4,000 audio books of the same title and 400 e-books.

In the technological battle to find the perfect way to read electronic books on your palm-top or personal computer, competing formats have put the consumer off.

David Steinberg, president of corporate strategy and international in New York with HarperCollins, said: "There was a format war. They compete and are not compatible. That creates resistance."

"Three years ago, there was a huge amount of hype but we did not get caught up in it. We steered away from digitizing all our works and dumping them into cyberspace," he told Reuters.

He said e-books, still a tiny part of the overall business, have a "30 percent plus" annual growth rate with HarperCollins putting out the complete works of thriller writer Agatha Christie electronically.

But the reader's love affair with the printed word is far from over because, as Chris Barnard, technology analyst at IDC consultancy, concluded, "One problem is that e-books are up against a very established technology, namely books. And most people are very happy with that technology."

[mhking]

Just damn.

If you want on the new list, FReepmail me. This IS a high-volume PING list...

[As i mentioned, the B/C & JD! lists are going to float into and out of whack over the forseeable future, while I try to cobble a rig back together for myself. My apologies for any incovenience or misunderstandings in this time frame. New signups/removals may be flaky in this time-frame as well; please bear with me, and keep in mind you may have to FReepmail me more than once for me to get it done. Thanks again!]

[Petronski]

Electronic books are great in certain specialties like law, medicine and engineering, but for something like Agatha Christie or Ernest Hemingway, just who did they imagine would want to curl up by the fire with some brandy and a liquid crystal display? Please.

[Support Free Republic]

Hi mom!

[Sofa King]

Gee, this is shocking. This is almost surprising as the XFL going bust.

[Petronski]

I like paper. It's hard to beat.

[Born Conservative]

I have some of the freebie Microsoft Reader E books for my Pocket PC; I don't particularly care to read from my PPC, and I don't like the digital rights management of the Microsoft Reader (you can only install the book on the PPC or computer that you have signed into with, of course, Microsoft Passport).

[dixie sass]

Nothing better on a cold, rainy winter afternoon than curling up under the afghan with hot chocolate, chocolate cookies and a good book!

There is something, a feeling of continuity with the past in turning the pages and feeling the paper under your finger tips.

Nothing better when you are feeling down than to pick up a favorite book friend and retreating into another time...

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

I travel quite a bit and I do like ebooks for that. I can drop a half dozen cd's in my bag and have enough reading material for a week.

I swap the cd's with friends who do the same thing. But if I decide the book is a keeper then I buy a copy for the shelf at home.

There is just something about a book, the way they feel in your hand, the way they look, the way they smell. Reading the words off a screen just isn't the same.

[strela]

I bought one E-Book, and it was a royal PITA to read on a computer. The reader kept crashing and I could never figure out how to "bookmark" my place when I stopped reading and went to do something else.

Never again.

[dixie sass]

ping

[eno_]

The real story is the utter and total rejection of protected content.

The UVA online library is servering up hundreds of thousands of copies of public domain e-books.

[KarlInOhio]

It's either that or the big ugly ostrich.

It's the reminder to support FR during the quarterly fund raising. I guess the "Hi Mom" version is to get you to figure out who sent it and why it was posted.

[Ciexyz]

I've read a lot of fiction online but it's not e-books, it's fan fiction written by fans of certain shows and films who post online their own stories based on the characters. And it's free of course, nobody wants to pay for anything on the Net.

[nravoter]

I think e-books were one of those ideas that looked good on paper, but... oh, never mind.

[weegee]

e-books may make sense where someone wants searchable (or hyperlinked) text but largely the time is not right for ebooks.

I spend enough time looking at my monitor to read/respond to FR as it is. My eyes need a break from the beaming of a display device (with the constant refresh lines).

I just downloaded an "e-book" by the way. It is the owner's manual for a TDK standalone CD burner. My friend bought the store demo model and it had no manual. Instead of having to send the company $5 for printing and shipping, I was able to download it for free.

Chrysler would not let me view the manuals online for my car (and their support person was looking at an online intranet without corresponding page numbers to the print manuals that I could order).

Information wants to be free. Some books contain information, others contain entertainment. Why does everyone have to make this so complicated?

[meowmeow]

I like reading e-books on my pocket pc. I've sharked the net for as many freebies as possible and am currently reading Augustine's Confessions. While I still love real books at home, for reading while squished on a train during morning/evening commute, standing in line somewhere, or sitting waiting for a meeting to start (or when the meeting starts getting much too boring), my PPC is perfect.