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* This post is from boingboing.net, one of the best blogs about computers/tech/lifestyle on the web. If you haven't ever visited I urge you to do so and bookmark the page for daily visits. I get the author's point about ebooks but I don't totally agree. I think he's right *now* but I don't think he'll be right in the future. Eventually someone will devise a way to make ebooks profitable, probably by bundling them with the 'dead tree' version (meaning books that use paper, i.e., "dead trees"). Eventually they'll catch on and then another nail will be driven into the coffin of traditional publishing.

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From boingboing:

My pal and collaborator Charlie Stross has a fantastic essay up today,
"Why the commercial ebook market is broken." He covers a lot of ground
-- DRM stinks, publishers have mucked things up, writers have said dumb
things -- but where he really sings is in puncturing the balloon that
is the fear that an ebook reader will make ebooks into substitutes for
print books.

First of all, if overlooks the point that publishers don't manufacture
ebook readers; the consumer electronics industry does. And the consumer
electronics industry will not cut off its own nose to spite its face by
producing an ebook reader for $20, if it can produce one with extra
bells and whistles that sells for $350. We've had the tech for a $20
(or $50, anyway) ebook reader for a decade; it would resemble a
grey-scale palm pilot, albeit without even the PDA functionality. But
the parts are dirt cheap these days! If a manufacturer thought they
could sell the beast, they'd be churning them out by the bucketload
— and it's perfectly possible to read ebooks on a 160x160 green
screen. I used to do it all the time in the mid to late 1990s. The
reason nobody makes such a beast is because it's simply not profitable
to do so. Explaining why this is so ought to lead into a long essay on
the cost structure of consumer electronics, but basically, unless the
Chinese government decides to subsidize its indigenous manufacturers in
order to deliberately destroy the western publishing industry, it ain't
gonna happen.

Secondly, and more devastatingly for the sky-is-falling promoters
of the "pirate ebooks will doom the publishing industry" theory, until
ebook readers cost no more than a hardback, 90% of readers will ignore
them. And that's regular readers, not the folks who own four books (and
one of them is a Bible). Expecting people to cough up $200 for a reader
so that they can then pay $25 for new novels to read on it — as
opposed to buying the novels for $25 (less discount) in hardcover and
having the cultural artefact — is, well, it's just bogus.

We might see such a device (at $200) take off in the book club
market. Imagine you join the e-book club. Your first sign-up gets you
an ebook reader loaded with five titles for $20. Then you have to buy a
book a month for the next year before you can leave, and you're paying
$20 a pop. After a year you've got 17 novels and an ebook reader, and
you're out $240 for a $200 reader. Most abook-clubbable people will
stay in (they're set up for the club and they've already got a small
bookshelf on their reader) and over the next year the club can make the
profits to pay for that first year's loss-leader.

But 80% of readers don't do book clubs. I've seen my book club
sales, and they're piss-poor (except in France, which is different).

Basically, the universal ebook reader is a non-starter —
at least for this generation — for the same reason that it's
near-as-dammit impossible to sell hardcover midlist novels for more
than US $24; consumers don't like being milked.

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