Got an e-Book reader for Christmas? Do you have a Kindle, Augen, Literati or other e-Book reader? (I own an Augen and Literati.) Well good luck with that. Which e-Book and which service did you use to purchase your e-Book? Did you use Kobo, Google e-Books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon-Kindle or another of a host of services? Did you register your device with Adobe Digital Editions?

If you did any of these things, all the money you spent may be wasted. You can't really do much with e-Books really. Well you can read them on your reader (if you figure out how to load your e-Book), but if you happened to use a different email address when you purchased them than the one you used to register with Adobe, you are going to be frustrated or just SOL.

When you buy a 'real book', you can do so many things:

Read it.

Highlight passages.

Write in the margins.

Dog-ear the pages for favorite passages.

Put it on a shelf.

Loan it to a friend.

Have another family member read it.

Sell it at a used book store or garage sale.

Give it to a friend.

Not with an e-Book and that is why it hasn't really taken off. Too many proprietary formats and too difficult to use, transfer or just read. If you have one of the main e-Book readers they will often have you 'register' with Digital Rights Management (DRM). Of course it requires you to use your ID or email you used but only a single one. If you happened to purchase an e-Book with another email address/account the e-Book reader is useless; so you have to purchase another one or totally reset and re-register with a new email address or DRM ID. Then of course, the old books you may have purchased are pretty much useless and UN-readable. You can't share an e-Book reader unless you share a common email address or DRM registration ID.

Until you can use an e-Book like a 'real book' it will continue to be a novelty. Now if you use an open source text based format like Calibre E-book Management and download classics (unprotected by DRM), you are good to go. As an industry, e-Books are way too expensive for the restrictions they impose. The cost is almost the same as a 'real book' and the readers are quite pricey and not very usable.

While many of the newer e-Book readers have WiFi, many are restricted to limited services. Those who have more capabilities like web browsing, are just too slow to do much. Some readers have only capabilities to access e-Books from the company offering them; more restrictions. If one family member has one brand, they may or are incompatible with each other, so you can't share books like you can with a 'real book'. Even if you use common software like Calibre, due to DRM restrictions you can't exchange them across readers unless you used a common email address or ID when you purchased the e-Book.

Until e-Books offer the same functionality as 'real books' they will remain a novelty. Too bad because the ability to carry an entire library at your beck and call is daunting and wonderful. Until the prices for digital media is drastically reduced, they will continue to sit on the digital shelves, while 'real books' are bought, sold, exchanged and given as gifts.

Recently (12/28/2010), Ken Follett's book, Fall of Giants was selling for $18.00 on Amazon. The Kindle version was $19.00. Now if you factor in the cost of manufacturing, production, distribution/shipping, warehouse management and other overhead the actual profit from the 'real book' sale is fairly small as is the commission to author! Now with the e-Book there are almost none of these expenses, so they are hugely profitable. The electronic versions should be selling at a fraction of the cost of the 'real book', but as this example shows, not so much.

So why in the world would anyone buy an electronic version of a current book instead of the 'real book' variety? Frankly I don't have a clue! Maybe that is why this new technology isn't taking off like wildfire! Greed.

So, I will stay with my 'real books' until the e-Books are more usable and cost effective. So few people read books anymore, you would think publishers would be bending over backwards to encourage and facilitate reading. The obvious price to value equation just doesn't compute when you compare e-Books to 'real books'. The convenience factor is far outweighed by the usage difficulty and restrictions imposed on the use and ownership of e-Books.

Let's hope someone learns a marketing and sales lesson. If e-Books were priced correctly and DRM restrictions were reasonable, they might just start to fly off those virtual shelves. Improve the speed and usability of the e-Book reading devices and you would have the 'perfect storm' of price to value equation.

Until then, back to the brick and mortar stores and the smell and feel of 'real books'. That can never be replaced, but convenience could win out and e-Books are probably the future.

Skip Stein

President

Management Systems Consulting. Inc.

Orlando, Florida USA