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| Check out an e-book |
January 19, 2004 |
By Peter Wolchak
I was stood up recently. I had three meetings scheduled in downtown toronto but my number two was a no-show, so I had 90 minutes to fill.
Luckily, I carry a PDA with me. I spied a coffee shop, settled into a corner table and lit up the pda.
I started with e-mail, which had been piling up. E-mail being what it is these days, I was able to delete most of the messages on sight.
With time left to kill it was back to the PDA. I currently carry 38 e-books with me, everything from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Robert Silverburg’s Born with the Dead. These are stored on a memory card that’s only slightly bigger and heavier than a postage stamp.
E-books are electronic versions of paper books that can be read on a desktop computer, a dedicated reading device, or on a Pocket PC or Palm-based handheld.
Two tables down from me, a well-dressed woman was holding a hard copy of Margaret Atwood’s latest novel, Oryx and Crake. Whereas I had multiple reading
options, she was stuck with just one book. I decided to return to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.
An engrossing half hour passed and I was almost late for my next appointment.
This little slice of life illustrates not only the value of owning a PDA, but also of loading it with e-books. How often do you find yourself between appointments or waiting for a plane without anything to read or, at least, anything you feel like reading?
If you already carry a PDA for business then e-books can fill in that workday downtime. They’re also useful at night because the illuminated screen is less annoying to your spouse than the bedside lamp. And while you may have room in your briefcase or backpack for a couple of paperbacks, you can load a PDA with dozens of books, including a large dictionary.
IDEAL E-TAIL
And e-book readership is growing.
Worldwide sales in 2003 were up by 30 per cent compared to 2002, according to the Open eBook Forum in New York, while traditional print publishing increased by only five per cent.
Look for those growth numbers to get even better for two reasons. First, kids today are very comfortable getting entertainment in digital formats. Consider MP3s and video games. Second, buying books online is simply too convenient not to gain steam. Find a book you like at one of the big three online sellers—http://www.fictionwise.com, www.palmdigitalmedia.com or http://www.amazon.com—and you can purchase and download it in minutes.
On the other side, publishers will eventually grow to love e-books, as they almost eliminate the three big costs of traditional publishing: printing, storage and shipping.
And although most established booksellers have not yet embraced the electronic world—there are no e-books for sale at http://www.chapters.indigo.ca for example—more savvy online sellers are already making millions in revenue.
All of which makes e-books the best e-tail bet out there. Sellers don’t have to deal with inventory and warehousing, and buyers can forget about shipping costs and waiting for a package.
And once you’ve got a PDA, getting in on this game is easy. Start with a free ride. There are about 1,800 publicdomain classics on offer from the University of Virginia (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/ebooklist.html) and thousands of free titles at http://www.blackmask.com.
And with the price of new-release e-books dropping, you’ll probably find yourself at one of the retail sites soon.
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