David Rothman has a new editorial up at TeleRead, in which he shows
that he's been reading the discussions on ebook-community. He plugs
ad-supported books: ``experimentation with ad-supported digital books
might be another way for p-book publishers to show they're generally
committed to e-books. I'd love to see more experiments like
HarperCollins's.'', and mentions the value issue: ``Customers don't
give a squat about publisher's margins. They just want enough value,
which an e-book, especially with DRM, can't offer with a hefty price
tag.'' He side-swipes the IDPF ("I can actually recall one executive
with a large publishing conglomerate saying that the houses in the
IDPF really don't care that much about genuine e-book standards, that
the organization is more of a water cooler or gentleman's club where
the members can exchange tips and gossip.") before quoting liberally
from Fred Reed's article about the Sony Reader.

http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=5745

Nice editorial, David, and I like a number of the points you raise,
but I don't think you follow your own logic *quite* far enough. Yes,
Sony, and the other publishers you allude to, are trying to get into
(or in Sony's case, stay in) the hardware game with their own gadget.
Others, like the eReader and Mobipocket folks, are trying to get
proprietary lock-in with software "gadgets".

But readers aren't playing along with this. They already have
gadgets, in the form of cell phones and/or laptops. They already have
reading software, in the form of their favorite Web browsers. And
they're not amused by the antics of publishers who don't respect their
technology decisions.

You might think of the current ebook situation as if p-book publishers
insisted on publishing everything in translations to their own private
language, or on some kind of paper which could only be illuminated
with special "reading light bulbs". Trying to standardize on a common
"ebook format", be it some IDPF creation, some OASIS masterpiece, or
even the so-called OpenReader, would only be an attempt to force them
all to publish in Esperanto, instead of their house languages. They
still wouldn't have customers.

It would be interesting to see what happened if publishers stopped
trying to push proprietary hardware and software, and instead sold
ebooks as content that could be read on standard hardware with Web
browsers. That is to say, if they respected their customers' choices.

Bill