I predicted the future successfully once, but never get any credit for it! Part of TidBITS' particular appeal has always been the accessibility of its writers. Ten years ago, before Twitter existed or journalists routinely published their email addresses, I had a sense that accessibility was going to be increasingly important to writers. Now that most reporters and novelists have Twitter feeds, blog, & public email addresses, I feel vindicated but foolish for never mentioning my foresight to anyone else. Fortunately, I now see another trend in the making...
Item #1: The experience of reading electronically is improving very rapidly, and is steadily growing more popular. I have been reading websites on my phone since 2003, when I got Plucker on my Treo 600. Today, I routinely read books on my iPhone in Instapaper, BookShelf, Eucalyptus, & Kindle.app. I also have Classics, B&N eReader, and a few other such apps. My father reads on his Kindle DX regularly, although I much prefer the iPhone.
Many people have strong attachments to paper books, and others say reading on an electronic gadget is an inferior experience. But our children and grandchildren will be even more familiar with electronic gadgets such as cellphones than we are with paper books and magazines. Second, the 2009 DX, iPhone, and Nook are all amazingly improved over the 6-year-old Treo 600. At that rate of improvement, in another dozen years I expect free ebook readers (subsidized by bookstores just like cellphones), which never need recharging or run out of space. Regardless of the details, this is clearly an area where technology will continue to improve rapidly.
Item #2: Reading on paper is constrained by physical availability of the reading materials. Ten years ago, almost everything people read came from bookstores, libraries, periodicals, or schools. Since then ordering books for 'mail-order' delivery has become commonplace, with Amazon as the biggest vendor. Debates about the Long Tail aside, we have much more choice in reading materials today than when I was a child, mostly thanks to the Internet.
But what does it all mean? - Now that there are so many gadgets and applications for reading ebooks, we likewise have myriad sources for the ebooks themselves. Amazon is easily the best known, with 350,000 Kindle ebooks available as of October 2009 (compared to the millions of paper books Amazon offers), and have plenty of competitors - with Barnes & Noble making the most noise lately - notably B&N offers half a million public-domain books from Google Books, free on the Nook and their eReader application. But both Amazon and B&N are clearly carrying their existing business model over to ebooks. Costs drop (compared to hardcovers), gratification is instant, and delivery charges are gone. This is a relatively simple and easy shift.
A larger change, however, comes from sites like Project Gutenberg, which offers about 30,000 free ebooks for download in a variety of formats. Several different ebook reading programs can access Gutenberg directly, although the hardware vendors have focused on their own commercial storefronts. And of course, individual authors make a range of ebooks available for download directly. Currently there's no good way to search through such private downloads - the only option now is to find an author's site and browse around, looking for download links. The Internet Archive's BookServer project is intended to tie together a searchable network of ebooks, making it easier to find books from a wide variety of sources - whether free, purchased, or borrowed (from libraries). Google is determined to be a player in some or all these areas, although the details are not yet clear.
Choice and Economics - Presented with such a variety of options for getting ebooks, the natural inclination is to consider the free options. Free paper books are rather rare, but free ebooks are common. There is price competition for paper books, but it's floored by the cost of printing and shipping. As a result, prices of ebooks are considerably more varied. As copyrights expire (if Disney lets them), and as people publish more free content, the pool of available free ebooks grows inexorably.
Each time I finish a book, I decide what to read next. Logically, cost is a factor. Faced with two books I expect to like about the same (or without any way to gauge which I'll enjoy more), my inclination is to read the free one, saving the purchased book for later. Faced with dozens of books to read and no particular preference, I tend to read the one I believe is 'better', which may be a beloved classic, even if I don't know what it's really like yet.
As I've been trying all ebook readers, and the various sources for ebooks, however, I've noticed another trend: I'm reading more older books, more public domain (lapsed copyright) books, and more current non-DRM books. I started reading ebooks seriously in March, and my Goodreads history shows the breakdown. Over that 8-month period, I read 13 paperbacks, 13 Kindle ebooks which I paid for, 6 ebooks bought from other vendors, and 23 free ebooks (including a few in Kindle format). Each time I finish a book and am deciding what to read next, I am conscious that tens of thousands of free books are available -
. I can read a purchased novel from Amazon (typically $8-10), or read a free book from Gutenberg, or a cheaper ebook from a smaller vendor. For example, WebScription has a different selection than Amazon's Kindle store, and their books are generally cheaper. B&N pricing is very similar to Amazon's, which makes sense as they're competing directly against each other.