Being a rather passionate book-lover and a programmer besides, eReaders are pretty much a perfect storm of two different branches of nerdery. Coming from that viewpoint, I couldn't help but think that David Carnoy's "Fully Equipped" column in last week's CNet was missing the point--and a very large one at that.
When you buy a book, you take home a bundle of dead tree and (hopefully) plant-derived ink and that's the end of that. No account number to track what items are at your fingertips or lent out. No remembering what page of each book you're on. No built-in dictionary. And if you lose it (or some dastardly soon-to-be-ex-friend doesn't bother to return it), too bad for you.
An eReader--at least one tied to a brand-name book vendor--is a bit more lingering. Or should be. For all the previous reasons as well as the fact that corrections and/or updates and/or addendum can be pushed to it. It's not like the editors at Doubleday microchip your paperback bodice-ripper to tone down the breathy dialog/narrative whenever federal CO2 emissions standards are tightened.
I think the problem is that two different products are being sold under the same heading. To the detriment of the electronic product's value proposition. Sure, I have my problems with the extremely haphazard quality of eBooks (and even the unsuitability of the format for some). But as a programmer I do realize that it's an apples-to-pumpkins kind of comparison. Mainly because I know that storage in the cloud is not free--even simple database table associations between people and books. Nor is 99.9+% uptime. Nor are device software updates.
Now, I'm not saying that retail shelf space, shipping, offloading overstock, staffing, etc. come at a discount, either. For all I know, the costs may come out even--though I rather doubt it. What I'm saying is that the vendors are doing a dreckish job of justifying the price differential to the consumer. No, that won't be an easy campaign--too much of anything delivered over the internet is liable to be considered "free." But that's a campaign that should have been planned well before any of the gadgets ever hit the market. Currently, the perception of what an eBook should be priced is based on a perception of cost that's not entirely accurate. By all rights, "cost" should not have entered the picture. Instead, the instant and ubiquitous access and the ongoing curation of the experience (not to mention one's ever-expanding library) should have been what was sold. Not words and pictures.
