Tennessean Takes a Stab at eBooks
An article by Gethan Ward in the Tennessean yesterday made an attempt to tackle the eBook conversation while talking to Nashville area publishers. Unfortunately (but predictably) journalists and industry ‘experts’ are still missing the point.
The article fused together the growth in digital Biblical reference works with the pursuit of the elusive killer iPod-like eBook reader that has yet to materialize (sorry Sony.) Time and time again, these two conversations become one just because the talk is about digitized books. Stop the insanity!
With the exception of the Bible itself, no one wants to carry around Wiersbe’s Outlines of the New Testament, the entire works of the Early Church Fathers, or any other biblical reference work on an eBook reader. eBook readers (conceptually) are best suited for fiction and non-fiction categories like biographies, business, news, and self-help.
What Ward either didn’t grasp (or wasn’t told) is that the value of a library of digital reference works surrounding the Bible is in having a software app that ties those reference works together allowing search, cross-reference, dictionary lookup in multiple languages, etc. In other words, programs like Logos Bible Software, Quickverse, and e-Sword. Now to Ward’s credit, those programs did come up in the article, e-Sword in a round-a-bout way when quoting ex-Nelson employee Phil Stoner who now is peddling book downloads for the e-Sword freeware program at estudysource.com.
I have little doubt that the article was probably prompted by Nelson’s recent press release announcing the partnership with Quickverse. But frankly the article was all over the place talking about PDAs, software programs, and eBook readers.
As I tackled in a previous post (and probably will need to tackle again says Don Quixote,) people that smell the second coming of the iPod in an eBook reader device are missing key differences between how music is consumed and how the written (pixelized) word is consumed. If you haven’t read the post, I encourage you to do so. In the hopper is a presentation on the subject I plan to make to help educate any publishers or retailers that will listen to help separate the myth and hype from reality and where I think the future of digital publishing is headed. I’ll roll out the outline here on the blog as it’s created.
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2 Responses to “Tennessean Takes a Stab at eBooks”Leave a ReplyYou must be logged in to post a comment. |
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January 17th, 2007 at 7:44 am
Really interesting observations Michael. Your link to your previous post is thought-provoking and I’m going to use it for our next team meeting as a discussion starter. Email me when your presentation is ready, we’d be interested or you should see if the ECPA would welcome you in this Spring to address our ranks.
March 11th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
I may be an exception, but I’m finding more and more that I’d love to have Bible reference materials with me while I’m reading. Would I use them all the time–no, but like MS Office today, when I need that unique tool, its great to have immediately at hand. In the middle of a small group study, its also great to be able to pull up the thoughts of Christian leaders who’ve gone before.
As to the eBook reader, I did some work in the eBook industry in 2001 when there were many vendor promises about the devices, but all fell short of the mark. PDA’s were, and still are, too small for the average reader. LCD screen quality just wasn’t there yet and the price point hadn’t fallen enough, either. That’s not so today. Keep your eyes on the ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) space. The newly announced Samsung Q2 will have a 7″ screen, 1028×600 resolution and sport a gig of RAM, a 60GB hard drive and Vista Home Premium.
Is that device for everyone? Again, no, but it ought to make one heckofa eBook reader/music player and video player, as well as a full-fledged tablet PC–at around the $1K price point (lesser equipped umpc’s are already available for $900). Add a broadband card and full-time connectivity and you begin to realize that there is no technical reason that you can’t have your Bible and two thousand years of commentary with you, just in case you need it.