E-readers vs readers – I rant for you.

Here’s a small bugbear that has been brewing in my mind this weekend regarding many of the e-book reader reviews and comments I’ve been reading recently. It seems like every man and his dog is releasing an e-reader at the moment, guaranteed to be the next Ipod and render books obsolete for good! Ahem. Yeah, whatever.

Wait, I have two bugbears.

Okay, firstly can we please stop comparing e-readers to  CDs/Ipods/whatever and using some old chestnut argument along the lines of “can’t stop progress” for being the reason why we need e-readers? They aren’t the same thing. Here’s a very basic explanation: the model of vinyl record played on record-player, CD played on CD player, MP3 file played on MP3 player has remained a consistent model the whole way through all technological changes around playing and listening to music.

Technology has not changed this basic concept, even if it has improved on it (music becoming digital and portable). You have an object, digital or analogue, that holds the music, then you have another object that plays it to you.

This isn’t the same concept as reading. You have an object with writing, you read it. No intermediary device (digital or not) is required. Digitising books produces some new possibilities but it doesn’t introduce enough improvements on the basic concept of a book for the solo reader, and it is a huge step backward for many features (ownership, resale, lending). At least in the current way of thinking about e-readers and digitised publications.

Secondly, the news that’s coming through is taking on a lot of this form “E-reader X in negotiations with Publisher Y for content”. Disaster ahead. One of the best possibilities for e-readers is in subscription (paid or not) style content – magazines/newspapers, the podcasts of reading, if you will. If certain e-readers are locked in to certain content providers…. well done everyone, you’re basically destroying your own industry. If you want to read these newspapers – well your choice is this device. Want to read many different periodical titles? Tough luck if they’re supplying content exclusively to the device that you don’t own.

As for books – will we get to choose devices based on what publishers they have access to? Buy this device if you like Random House books but you’ll never be able to get Penguin titles on it. It’s bad enough that we currently have devices that allow you to purchase from one retailer only. How many $500PLUS devices do we get to waste money on?

I get that content has to be delivered for these devices and that agreements need to be made – but exclusivity? Doesn’t it sound like we have lots of fun times of “jailbreaking” e-readers and pirating content ahead?

I’m not entirely Luddite, I just would like to be convinced.

So ends the BookieMonster Monday Rant…