Main threats to E-Readers

Main threats to E-Readers

1. Why Publishers are a threat to e-Books:

Publishers are enhanced for a world where physical books rule and Publishers control everything.
What is best for books and readers isn’t necessarily best for Publishers and E-books are a great design of this. A lot of people are under the magic that Publishers would choose what’s best for books over their own survival – That’s expecting too much. You can read up accounts of how E-books were killed 10 years ago or see the design now (Agency Model, higher prices, sales tax on E-books).
Note that this is not a value-judgment. There is no right or wrong. Perhaps Publishers feel the best thing for books is to kill off eBooks. Perhaps Publishers don’t understand they are unintentionally criticizing eBooks. Even if they were consciously killing eBooks solely to preserve their control and profits it’s still not good or evil.
Publishers are the biggest threat to eBooks because in the end it might come down to only one out of eBooks and Publishers surviving.

2. The Dangers of Fragmentation:

1.Companies can’t hit economies of scale.
2.Companies can’t create enough profit to do the necessary R&D.
3.People are insecure of what device to go with.

3. Pretend-E-readers seducing Readers and then distracting them from reading:

We’re not talking about any device that gets readers to read more than they would or gets non-readers to start reading.
We’re talking about a device that is optimal for something other than reading and which people who love to read are led to believe is a better option than dedicated E-Readers. Once they own the pretend-E-reader they end up reading less than they would on a dedicated reading device. Sometimes they will end up reading even less than they did before.

Take a device that -
•Takes a user who would buy a Kindle and then buy 3 eBooks a month.
•Turns that user into a pretend-reader who buys 5 movies a month and buys just 1 book every 2 months.
No matter how you slice it that device is damaging to reading and eBooks.

4. Race to the Bottom in eBook Prices:

This might be unavoidable. It’s almost the reverse of the Publisher threat. Here we have a complete lack of barriers to entry which results in infinite competition and authors and publishers are forced to compete on price. As prices go below a certain threshold quality will probably suffer. That in turn might lead to less interest in reading.

5. Competing Forms of Entertainment improving their quality and increasing value for money faster than Publishing:

We’ve seen this happen over the last few decades. E-Readers and eBooks and the price savings and convenience they offer are perhaps the only improvements books have had. Books need them to be able to compete with all the new improvements in TV, movies, video games, and music. The more Publishers fight books and E-readers the more they weaken the attractiveness of books. If Publishers are successful in stalling eBooks they might have managed to eliminate their best chance of strengthening the attractiveness and viability of books.

There are also a number of other threats to E-Readers and eBooks:

1.Advertising supported eBooks. Attractive self-explanatory.

2.Low quality E-Readers. A lot of the clone factory E-Readers provide a terrible reading experience and could end up souring users to eBooks and E-readers. It’s rather unfortunate that they are usually cheap and promise ‘free’ and other appealing things.

3.Overwhelming selection of eBooks combined with Lack of Discoverability. We have hundreds of thousands of books being published every year. Removing the barriers to publishing means all of these are available. The lack of a really good recommendation system means users have to wade through everything that doesn’t make it to the bestseller lists.

4.Amazon and Sony and B&N potentially getting abstracted. We need at least 2 of the Big 3 to stay committed to making a dedicated E-Reader. Amazon is especially critical as it understands it’s about providing a service and not just the shiniest device.

5.Also the price threaten the E-Leader because of the expensive, for example E-Reader companies could have designed Hello Kitty themed E-Readers with 52″ plasma screens and opened them up wider than the grand canyon and you still wouldn’t buy them as 52 plasma screens cost much money .