Richard Nantel

Amazon launched their e-book reader this morning. Here’s a demo from the Amazon site.

I can’t help thinking it looks like a big cheap calculator or perhaps a medical device. =:0 At the very least, Amazon should make it available in nice colors.

Interestingly, in this Newsweek article about the Kindle, the One Laptop per Child XO laptop I wrote about last week is mentioned as a good choice for an e-book reader. The XO laptop has a high resolution screen (1200 × 900, 200 DPI) and can be charged by hand. Here’s the quote:

“All this becomes even headier when you consider that, as the e-book reader is coming of age, there are huge initiatives underway to digitize entire libraries. Amazon, of course, is part of that movement (its Search Inside the Book project broke ground by providing the first opportunity for people to get search results from a corpus of hundreds of thousands of tomes). But, as an unabashed bookseller, its goals are different from those of other players, such as Google—whose mission is collecting and organizing all the world’s information—and that of the Open Content Alliance, a consortium that wants the world’s books digitized in a totally nonproprietary manner. (The driving force behind the alliance, Brewster Kahle, made his fortune by selling his company to Amazon but is unhappy with the digital-rights management on the Kindle: his choice of an e-book reader would be the dirt-cheap XO device designed by the One Laptop Per Child Foundation.)

My XO laptop will get here shortly, so I’ll provide a review when it arrives.

Back in June, I wrote that large publishers such as HarperCollins and Random House are currently focusing a lot of energy and resources to publishing e-books. These publishers reported that, although sales for e-books never lived up to expectations since their launch in the mid to late 1990s, they now feel this is about to change.

Ãœber-retailer Amazon seems to agree. Next week, Amazon is launching its own e-book reader, the Kindle.

The Kindle is EVDO-enabled, allowing you to subscribe to and download electronic content such as newspaper stories. Amazon is obviously hoping people use the direct connection to its online store to purchase e-books. The device is also audio-enabled, allowing you to listen to audio books and podcasts.

The photo of the Kindle above is the one circulating on the Web. If Amazon’s e-book device really looks like this, it will be a huge flop. From a design perspective, this is one ugly machine, reminiscent of computers from the early 1980s. In a world that now pays a premium for sexy electronic toys such as iPhones, what was Amazon thinking?

The topic of e-books always seems to ruffle feathers. Traditional paper book lovers can’t get their heads around reading their beloved books on-screen. Early e-book adopters have grown bitter that e-books never seemed to gain much ground and that the world of e-books is mired in format turf wars.

Where am I on the subject of e-books?

The manufacturing of paper is one of the top five energy consumers in the United States. Given that much of this energy is derived from carbon-spewing power plants, I applaud any attempts to reduce paper consumption.

Stranded at the grocery checkout line while the person ahead of me counts out the exact change in pennies and nickles, I’ll often turn to my Palm TX PDA, loaded up with my favorite RSS newsfeeds. But, to be honest, this isn’t a pleasant experience. The screen is tiny, navigation is a pain, and the text is hard to read. I’d never choose to read this way.

I want to be an e-book evangelist. But, I know of no device yet that will convince me to switch. (From what I’ve read and seen so far, the Amazon Kindle isn’t going to be it either.) That’s sure to change in a couple of years. Who knows, after changing the way people listen to music, perhaps Apple, or another innovative, design-centered company, will change how we read.

In my last two posts, I mentioned that large publishing houses are predicting that e-books will become very popular in the near future. If these companies are right, and if we can solve all the issues around e-book formats, costs, etc., this shift from paper to electronic format will provide significant benefits to the world of learning:

• In the K-12 academic world, students today look like travelers leaving on a six-month expedition. They walk to and from school pulling their backpacks on wheels like luggage, or haul them on their backs like sherpas preparing to carry provisions to the summit of Mount Everest. E-books hold the promise of freeing this generation from the burden of carrying heavy textbooks back and forth between home and school. In exchange for freeing them from this ball and chain, our kids will be so thankful, they’ll clean their rooms, eat their broccoli, and will abandon all the embarrassment they have of us when their friends come over.

• Printed learning manuals and textbooks are often highly inefficient. Although a book may be hundreds of pages in length, only a chapter or two may be required by the learner. Solutions such as Safari currently exist on the Web that provide instructors with a way to create their own custom textbooks and manuals using chapters from different publications. Once assembled, the electronic file can then be downloaded to a portable device.

• Although many of us have a romanticized view of traditional printed books, the reality is that, in a world of shrinking resources and climate change, the manufacturing of paper is one of the top five energy consumers in the United States. E-books are a significantly “greener” way to provide reading materials.

• Just as an iPod can hold 10,000 songs, many e-book readers will hold many thousands of pages of information. Much of the learning and performance support materials you will ever need to access for a task will fit on a small device in your pocket. Think of the benefits for maintenance workers who can access any information they need easily.

• Tools included in these devices or built into the e-book format can provide the learner with search functions, bookmarking features, the ability to add study notes, links to audio/video files, etc., considerably extending the abilities of a conventional paper-based book.

Last thoughts

I’m presently preparing to leave on a two-week vacation to a little house by the ocean in New Brunswick. My dining room table is covered with items my family and I are bringing on this trip. Among the clutter is a mountain of books that rises almost to the ceiling. For everyone in my family, nothing is more relaxing than sitting on a beach blanket reading a good book. With time on our hands, we’ll collectively go through a huge number within the span of these two weeks.

My wife and I would not consider replacing our vacation books with one device each filled with the e-books we plan to read. Our middle-age eyes would likely have difficulty reading the text in the glare of sunlight. And, to be honest, we have a romantic view of paper-based books. We like the smell of paper, the design and typography, and everything else about conventional books.

My children, on the other hand, might feel differently. Since this generation was raised in front of TV/computer/Game Boy displays, they are comfortable reading text on a screen. Plus, they REALLY like electronic gadgets. Consequently, this generation may welcome the transition from paper-based books to e-books.

One of the things standing in the way of e-book adoption may simply be the ingrained habits of people raised on paper-based materials. As this generation passes, e-book adoption will likely grow.

Listen to this article

Stephen Downes, in commenting about my last post about e-books, mentioned that he’s skeptical that e-books will take off:

“…like online music, what will make eBooks popular is not the e but the free. Establish the free market first. Only then can you even think of charging for (some) content.”

I agree that the growth of a free market would drive the creation of a commercial market. But, there’s another major hurdle standing in the way of e-books gaining wide adoption: the lack of inexpensive, easy-to-use e-book authoring tools.

In recent months, a new, non proprietary file format for e-books has hit the publishing world. OEBPS Container Format (OCF) is XML-based and provides significant benefits over Adobe Acrobat and other commonly used formats. E-books published in OCF adjust their content to best display on different devices. At a recent conference event, an Adobe rep was referring to documents in this format as “liquid paper” to describe their adaptability.

To see what this new format looks like, install the plugin (3 MB), and sample some of the e-books Adobe and other publishers are making available for free. Here’s what this format and player look like:

There’s much to love about this new file format. For one, it manages all your e-books, sort of iTunes-like, allowing you to easily switch between reading one e-book and another. (Wouldn’t it be cool to have all the learning materials related to a subject accessible through one easy interface?)

If you’d like to produce a document in this format, it appears you have two options:

1. Purchase Adobe InDesign, a desktop publishing application ($699). This is the only commercial desktop application I’ve found so far that publishes to OEBPS Container Format.
2. Create the XML files manually using a text editor and create the container file using WinZip. (Non-geeks, beware.)

Podcasts became ubiquitous because cheap (often free) tools became available that enabled anyone with a microphone to publish audio files. For e-books to catch on, basement publishers will need access to similar tools. Until then, we won’t be seeing e-books as a popular format for learning content or anything else.

I recently had a chance to speak to representatives of HarperCollins, Random House, and other publishing firms and was surprised to see how much energy and resources these companies are currently allocating to e-books. Publishers report that sales for eBooks never lived up to expectations since their launch in the mid to late 1990s. But, they all feel this is about to change. Consequently, these companies are now feverishly converting current publications as well as a significant amount of their back lists into e-book format.

There are a few reasons for their optimism:

• A few months ago, Sony launched a new e-book delivery device called the Sony Reader that’s creating quite a bit of buzz. Sony must feel optimistic about e-books to have invested substantial R&D dollars to bring a new reader to market.

• The über retailer, Amazon, is purported to be preparing to make e-books available through its online store. Publishers report that one of the main obstacles that has inhibited the growth of e-books is the lack of a major retailer.

• Small mobile devices such as cell phones, iPods and other audio players, personal digital assistants (PDAs), etc. are now ubiquitous, providing potential delivery platforms for e-books.

• A new non-proprietary file format (OCF, also known as epubs) has just been developed and is in many ways superior to past formats. One of the main advantages of this format is that it dynamically optimizes the display of the content to best fit the device.

The popularity of iPods and other audio devices has led to growing adoption of podcasting as a delivery format for learning content. If the big publishing houses are right and e-books take off this time around, e-book content may soon be a big part of most organizations’ learning strategies.