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Tag: ebooks (Page 5 of 5)

eBooks Are For Muggles!

January 19, 2011 /

As I continue to add more books to my Nook, it surprises and saddens me just how many classics are not available for purchase in any eBook format. Last night, while preparing for a Bible study I was hoping to add some of the reference books for our study of Romans to my Nook. I was greatly disappointed to find that many of them were not available as eBooks. Given the command to make disciples of all nations, I don’t think Paul would be too happy that much Christian thought was not available in one of the easiest formats to share with the entire world. If Paul were here today, I have little doubt he’d be sure to publish in ePub format!

I kind of expect religious literature to be, *ahem*, hidebound and slow to come to new formats. But for a highly successful commercial series like the Harry Potter books, it’s rather surprising and annoying. You will find many books about Harry Potter in eBook format, but not the series itself. That remains “safely” on paper pages, though I’m  sure a quick Google search will turn up many digital copies of dubious origin. The cat being out of the bag anyway, why not make an eBook version available for people willing to pay for it? But I guess eBooks are only for muggles…sigh.

Will Borders Troubles Lead To More eBook Manga?

January 15, 2011 /

I visited my neighborhood Borders yesterday for some hands on time with the Kobo eBook reader. I was impressed by its really slim design and its responsiveness, a good buy at $99. After that I did my usual perusal of the manga section, looking for new volumes in series I follow and any other new titles that might be promising.

In particular, I was looking for Neon Genesis Evangelion: Campus Apocalypse Volume 2. I’d bought volume 1 there a few weeks ago and saw online that volume 2 had actually been out a while. I was a bit annoyed to see that volume 2 was still not there. I resigned myself to the likelihood I would have to order it online and went home.

Later I learned that Diamond Book Distributors had put all shipments to Borders on hold.  I’d already heard that Borders was negotiating with publishers to delay payment to them while they seek new financing. But this was the first I’d heard of shipments being stopped. Diamond distributes books for a number of manga publishers, including Dark Horse, the U.S. publisher of the manga I was looking for.

This situation leaves me no other choice than the online option for new manga. There aren’t any other bookstores nearby that carry new manga. If Borders goes under, it’s going to be a lot harder to find manga at retail. Fewer bookstores will make it more difficult for all publishers to sell books profitably.

I think the shrinking number of bookstores is already a factor driving the adoption of eBooks. Graphic novels have been slower to come to the medium, in part due to their use of color. But manga are mostly black and white, they generally translate to eBook form very well. If shipments of most manga to Borders have already stopped, then perhaps we will see an accelerated move to the eBook format.

The situation for manga is further complicated by the very strong reluctance of Japanese publishers to embrace digital media. But the growth of iPad app versions of popular manga would indicate that they are changing their stance. And declining manga sales in Japan has increased the importance of sales outside of the country. A Borders collapse in the U.S. would be a big problem for Japanese manga publishers who are already facing the challenge of widely circulating illegal scans of their titles on the internet. Some of these scans have even been packaged up and sold in the Apple App Store!

In the end, the threat of piracy on one side and the collapse of a major bookseller on the other, will lead to more eBook manga. At this point, there’s no going back.

Buy It Again: Building Your Digital Bookshelf

January 14, 2011 /

Yesterday I gave my wife a Nook Color for her birthday. She had already shown a lot of interest in my Nook, but I also knew that she was very interested in Apple’s iPad as well. In the end, the Nook Color won out because it was the best overall value for the money. I knew my wife would want to do more than just read books, but not enough more to justify the greater cost of the iPad.

She’s very happy with her new Nook and now faces the joyful task of filling it with books. It seems that every media transition leaves us buying our collections all over again. I still remember the great tape to CD migration and the horrible carnage it left behind in my wallet! Going from CDs to MP3s was somewhat less traumatic. In each of the aforementioned transitions, most of the trouble and expense was due greedy record companies who kept costs for the consumer much higher than the cost of production justified. CDs cost a lot less than LPs and tapes to make, but even now you’ll find CDs in excess of $20 retail in the US, even higher in Japan. The artifically high high cost of music coupled with the growth of the web, lead to rampant piracy which eventually forced prices to go down. With that history still fresh in our minds, I don’t think there will be a repeat of this in the transition to eBooks.

It is true that publishers have pushed back, maintaining eBook prices that equal or sometimes exceed printed book prices for popular authors and inciting the wrath of many. But I don’t see this remaining the case very long for a number of reasons. One of those is the huge wealth of classic literature already available for free or very low cost, completely legal!  Amazon and Barnes & Noble have done well to make acess to these very easy in their eBook stores. Many of these public domain classics are also available for download from the Project Gutenberg and similar groups. So adding many of those books you had to read in high school won’t cost anything at all!

Another reason the high prices cannot be maintained is the declining number of physical bookstores. This has been the trend since Amazon became popular, first selling physical books and now eBooks. Sales of eBooks on Amazon recently passed those of hardback books on the site for the first time. And the Kindle has been their best selling product for a number of years now. Consumers are used to buying things online for less than retail stores and digital goods for less than physical ones. With fewer places to sell physical books and consumers who are warming up to buying eBooks online, the prices must come down.

Finally, piracy has not disappeared. As the number of eBook readers go up, so will demand for the works of popular contemporary authors in that format at what is considered to be a fair price. It doesn’t take a mathematician to know that it costs less to make and sell a copy of an eBook than a physical book. Any popular, but overpriced eBook will almost certainly be widely pirated, just as music and movies continue to be. There will always be piracy, but if the success of iTunes has taught us anything, it’s that if product is easy to get legitimately at a fair price, most will take the easy route.

So by all means, buy those books again! It’ll be cheaper than last time and the added functionality and portability is more than worth it. The only thing I really miss is not being able to proudly display my collection of eBooks when people visit my home.

More Manga For The Nook Please!

January 12, 2011 /

When I bought my Nook eBook reader, I already knew that I wasn’t going to find much in the way of comics and manga to read on it. I bought it because I wanted to be able to carry a lot of novels and technical manuals without the enormous weight and bulk of physical books. Still it was my hope that as eBooks gained in popularity, I would eventually see more titles for my ereader of choice.

I think that time has finally come! Manga, Japanese graphic novels, have been available in digital form for a long time in the form of illegal translated scans, or “scanlations.” And it is not too difficult to format and load these on eBook readers like the Kindle or Nook. But those looking to get their manga fix legally have had few options. Though I should note that there is a lot of yaoi (homosexual romance stories) manga available for the Kindle in Amazon’s Kindle store. But this has somewhat limited appeal.

Recently, a number of publishers have started to offer popular manga titles online, readable in a web browser. These are either introductory chapters to new manga available for free, or entire volumes purchasable usually for less than the print version. While this doesn’t do anything for those wanting to read manga on the Nook, it makes sense given that the targeted market has been reading manga in their browsers on pirate web sites for years. A number of these pirate sites have been shut down over the last year, and now publishers are hoping that readers will embrace the legal alternatives they are providing.

Some Online Manga Sites

I think rising popularity of Apple’s iPad opened a door that is leading to greater manga availability for eBook readers as well. A growing list of manga titles, comics, and related magazines have appeared as iPad apps. The iPad has clearly popularized the tablet form factor. It’s $500 entry price forced down the prices of dedicated eBook readers like the Nook and Kindle which in turn increased their sales. Now a host of new tablets such as the Motorola Xoom and the Blackberry Playbook will soon hit the market.

Tablets are a natural fit for eBooks and color ones are especially good for comics, magazines, and manga. While manga are mostly black and white, the cover art and optional inserts are generally in color. So I don’t think it is a random coincidence that Digital Manga Inc. released Vampire Hunter D for the Nook around the time that the Nook Color became available. There are both black and white and color editions available. At only $250, the Android powered Nook Color has already seen good sales and may become the entry level tablet of choice for many.

I hope that we are seeing the beginning of more mainstream, popular manga titles for the Nook and other eBook readers. There’s no real technical cost to supporting a title on both tablets and readers. And with dedicated readers racing towards the $99 price point, it would be silly not to sell there. I think the next year is going to tell the tale. Manga looks pretty good on my Nook, so I hope I’ll see a lot more of it soon!

eBook Apps for Babies?

January 11, 2011 /

One of the exciting things about eBooks is the potential to do things that you simply cannot do with printed paper books. The Nook Color has already started to explore this territory with a growing line up of color kids books. And now for an even younger crowd, Ladybird has adapted its Baby Touch series of books for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. The obvious question arises of whether or not babies are too young to be interacting with eBooks of any kind.

Having some experience with babies and technology, I know that our kids usually want to play with our “toys” as much as we do. One of the first C++ applications I ever wrote was a keyboard banging game called Baby Mush that I created so that my daughter could bang away on my computer without disturbing my other work. I’m pretty sure it was the first and only such app ever written for OS/2! And of course, the urge that parents feel to dress and accessorize our kids like mini versions of ourselves is very strong.

Still, Nintendo’s 3DS warning against use of the upcoming game console by players under 6 years of age, should give one pause against bringing babies into the digital age too soon. With eyesight and coordination still developing, babies need more interaction with the real world than the digital one. But it’s highly unlikely that any parent is going to abandon their infant to play with an eBook on an iPad all day. All in all, I’d say it’s a pretty good time to be a baby!

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