The E-Book is Coming (but not quite yet)

As a former travel guidebook author, I somewhat follow the evolution of the Kindle and the future of e-books, which I assume will one day replace the paper versions. Kindles still suck, but they will improve over time. But can you imagine the advantage to carrying a small electronic device loaded with the latest information on guesthouses in Sukothai along with a detailed and completely up to date map? The mind boggles. Printed guidebooks are on their way out, but I'd give them another five or eight years before they are replaced. Slate reports on the shitty conditions of current Kindles and why e-books should stay priced at $9.99 until this industry is established. Otherwise, hello Napster for illegally downloaded e-books.

What has kept illegal e-books from taking off? First, all the electronic reading gadgets on the market are subpar, if you ask me, making the reading of books, newspapers, magazines, and even cereal boxes painful. The resolution is poor. The fonts are crap. The navigation is chunky. Not since the eight-track player has modern technology produced such a heap of garbage. If you're looking for the reason e-books constitute just 1 percent or 2 percent of all book sales, stop the search. Second, the hassle factor is too great. Only a student or a deadbeat with a lot of time on his hands is going to want to search the Web and scour the torrents for, say, a free, bootlegged copy of A.J. Liebling's The Telephone Booth Indian. It's as tedious as fishing! Third, not all bootlegged e-books are created equal. On finally finding that free book you so desire, you may find yourself wishing you had purchased the legal edition: Your bootleg may be filled with typographical errors, thanks to the slipshod application of optical character-recognition software. If a nicely produced Kindle version of The Telephone Booth Indian that doesn't have to be monkeyed around with can be easily nabbed for $9.99, which it can, why bother breaking the law to obtain an inferior edition for display on a rotten device? It's like using an acetylene torch to loot a kid's piggy bank.

Right now, the electronic-book market finds itself roughly in the same place the market for MP3s was in 1999, the year after the release of the first portable MP3 player. First adopters of e-books, who are filling their devices with content and proselytizing to their friends, have it better than the early MP3 users. The iTunes store, which was established in early 2003, was among the first online sites where music fans could easily buy music files, a la carte, from a huge selection. The other commercial sites, wrote the New York Times, were "complex, expensive and limiting" and "failing because they were created to serve the interests of the record companies, not their customers." Basically, before iTunes arrived, if you wanted portable tracks, you had to rip your own, borrow collections from friends, or grab "free" tunes from the "pirates" at Napster or other file-sharing sites.