The end of eReaders?

Doom-and-gloom headlines like this one get people stirred up, but usually they're just tricks to get wider readership for an author.

As for this "report," it sounds to me like total nonsense. The availability of books in different formats will inevitably effect us, but I doubt if in this way. More likely the ever-increasing number of formats will open up books to wider readership & more engagement in the contents than restrict it.

I can't see eReaders going anywhere unless it's proven that the eInk is slowly turning our retinas into milk or something.

I'm with a previous poster. I thought the thread title meant that dedicated e-readers are giving way to tablets and smartphones. I love my Sony Reader--it has THE BEST internal dictionaries (17 of them, in all sorts of languages)--but I read books almost exclusively on my iPad and iPhone now, as I always have one or the other with me.

Anyone want to buy a Sony Daily Edition Reader?

ereader or not doesn't matter, you can still underline. Can't say the same for movies, though I suppose there is note taking.

Old Hack said:

In fifty years there will still be areas of the world where technology can't reach; many people don't have easy access to an electricity supply; and technology changes, so digital files which are accessible now might well be obsolete by then. Print books will still work well under those conditions. I am not so sure that they'll have been abandoned while so many people will still need them.

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I think the printed codex book is here for several centuries.

• A carefully made book has a better archival life than any extant digital media.
• It requires no external power source.
• It is readily portable.

At both NASA and Boeing I was tasked to work on a committee to do a five-year forecast for the company. They paid me for two weeks plus any travel expenses needed at one company, and four weeks plus travel on the other. So this is a semi-pro's perspective.

First, every system always has pluses and minuses. This certainly applies to printed books and electronic books. For them the pros and cons of each tend to be complementary.
Briefly, ebooks are highly portable; you can put thousands of books on one device. Printed books require no power or special device and are sturdier.

Ebooks allow you to do sophisticated processing of the text, such as instant dictionary and thesaurus and encyclopedia lookup, and posting of favorites and comments on social media. Printed books offer a more ergonomic experience because of centuries of trial and error and careful thought. (Ebooks are improving in this regard but still have a way to go.)

And so on.
Special-purpose ereaders and multi-purpose ereaders similarly have their pluses and minuses, and tend to be complementary. Single-purpose devices tend to be much cheaper and sturdier and last longer on a charge. Multi-purpose devices offer a more ergonomic reading experience and can do many more functions than otherwise, because they are powerful computers.

There is much technological research to make these devices cheaper and more powerful. This will speed the introduction of them into the poorer parts of the world, as they've done with cell- and satphones, and give the providers a wider market. (I foresee the day (not very near!) when the cheapest ereaders can be given away the way junk mail is today, and every household has dozens lying around.)

But print tech is advancing too, and has been for more than a century. For the same price "pbooks" today are larger, sturdier, and more flexible in their content than in past decades. Also, printers are becoming smaller, faster, cheaper, and deliver ever-better quality, which allows smaller print runs to be more economical. Print-on-demand is becoming a viable publishing method, though it still has a good way to go.

BOTTOM LINE: Literacy is evolving and growing in numbers and quality all over the world. It is in no danger of slowing down, much less dying.

I'm on vacation and have been using an e-reader. The Nook with glow light so I could read in the dark. It's been nice to have it. I loaded up some books before I left because I was going to a place w/o good internet connections.

What I miss about the paper books is the tactile pleasure of the pages. Plus with paper books if I'm looking back to find a particular part, I can remember what side it was on ( left or right page) and what part of the page. "I read that about 1/3 of the way through, left side, last paragraph on page." No way to do that on e-reader.

I'll probably use a mixture of paper and e-books for a long time. No right/wrong - just different circumstances.

YOU'LL GET MY NOOK WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS.

juniper said:

I'm on vacation and have been using an e-reader. The Nook with glow light so I could read in the dark.

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That one looked really nice but unfortunately finances meant I had to buy a lesser model. Mostly I use it to read my WIPs and betas from friends anyway.

Buffysquirrel said:

That one looked really nice

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The Nook was my second choice. I'd really prefer to have a Kobo, the Aura, which has better software than the Nook, WiFI, and there's no bezel on the rim, so it's easy to use all part of the touchscreen. I have trouble getting my fingertip into the corner edge of the Nook, to change settings etc. And it has the light for reading in the dark. It's a bit more expensive but I like the design.

Kobo Aura is here: http://www.kobo.com/koboaura#overview

Problem is Kobo's customer service sucks big time. It's been a problem for a long time, and apparently there's no change in sight. At least the service for USA is bad. Some other countries seem to have it better, from what I've read in reviews online.

The Nook has in-store customer service plus good online chat service. So, I'll probably stick with the Nook for now. It worked well on vacation. I was glad to have it.

Yes, I contacted Kobo customer service for help transferring my Sony Reader library to my Kobo library, as Sony hadn't sent me the link they promised and Kobo required. Kobo's reply was basically "sucks to be you."

ETA: So now I go to iBooks first when I want an ebook...neener, neener, Kobo.

Sorry to hear about the problems, Dreamweaver. They don't speak well for Sony.
For what it's worth it won't be long before Christmas sales. Last Christmas I bought a Nook Glow Light for fifty dollars. Amazon will also have sales.

A few months after I bought my nook simple it stopped working due to a known problem. I sent it back to Barnes and Noble and they sent me a new one that's been working great every since.

Nook runs both Barnes and Noble's DRM and Adobe DRM, if that's important to you.

I have a Kindle which I use frequently, and I also still read printed books. If I'm thinking about a book I read a while back, I often can't accurately remember whether I read it on the Kindle or read the printed version. So the idea that there is some Cognitive Big Difference between the two just seems silly and maybe even a bit hysterical to me.

DreamWeaver said:

Yes, I contacted Kobo customer service for help transferring my Sony Reader library to my Kobo library, as Sony hadn't sent me the link they promised and Kobo required. Kobo's reply was basically "sucks to be you."

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Make sure you check your junk or spam folders. I'd also do a search for the word Sony.

And if you have Web support for your email, check on the Web as well.

Email can be spam filtered before it arrives on your computer, as well as after.

There are several different elements here - the study, the headlines and our reactions to it.

When I first read about this in online newspapers (Guardian and Telegraph), my first reaction was that the study was probably flawed. It felt like an attack piece. The logic is "I believe in X. Here is some highly selective evidence that X may be true. Therefore everyone should believe in X."

And if the study wasn't flawed I wanted it to be. I like e-readers. I own several on different devices. So I am pre-disposed to defend them against attack.

But when I read a bit more deeply, it seems that the study may well be genuine. There could be some issues with it - for example, it's a small sample size and I heard (second-hand) that most of the people in the tests hadn't used e-readers. But apart from that it seemed a pretty credible bit of research.

But the study didn't talk about the death of e-readers. If anything it gave them a fairly clean bill of health. The performance of books and e-readers were similar in all respects except one - this thing about being able to judge when events in a book happened.

Okay, fair enough. I can see that. The physical experience of an e-book is different to holding a paper book. That might give advantages and disadvantages. I can adjust the font size, but I don't get a physical impression of how big the book is. Pros and cons. Is that a big deal?

As others have said, the biggest disconnect is between the research and the headline. I don't blame the OP for this - the newspaper articles I saw were doing the same thing. The research most certainly did not say that e-readers were doomed. That was just put there by an editor trying to get an emotional response from readers.

The other disconnect here is the way that I and others reacted to the headline. My first gut instinct was to doubt the study - even though I had no evidence (at first) to make that call. It was saying something that I didn't want to be true, so I went into my caveman's fight of flight response.

I suppose the headline writers win either way. They write something like "the e book is doomed". If I believe that - or want to believe that - I will read the article to confirm my point of view.

But if I don't believe that e-readers are doomed then I will read the article anyway, if only to look for evidence that the study is wrong ... because I want it to be.

My blog on this

http://willonce.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/the-kindle-is-doomed/

Medievalist said:

Make sure you check your junk or spam folders. I'd also do a search for the word Sony.

And if you have Web support for your email, check on the Web as well.

Email can be spam filtered before it arrives on your computer, as well as after.

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Thanks for the advice, which is very good. Unfortunately, I have already done every search I could think of through my mailbox, once I realized the link *should* have arrived some time ago. Then I wrote Sony support to ask them to resend the personalized link. Sony library by this time had been closed for some two months. Their response was basically, "Sorry, we ram-dumped everything. Talk to Kobo."

The basic problem was me not realizing the link should have arrived by x time; the cause of the problem was Sony closing down their operation; transferring one's Sony library to Kobo was the arranged safe haven. Kobo were absolutely no help, even though I already had a Kobo account with books in it...just not the ones I'd bought from Sony.

This is the ebook cautionary tale. I've had to recreate or transfer my ebook library three times, as different providers (Rocket, Borders, Sony) have closed their ebook operations. I've had to learn how to hack the files to use them on different platforms, which is not really the epitome of the convenience I was hoping ebooks would provide . I still love ebooks, but I can't say they are a failsafe buy-it-once-and-have-it-forever solution .

But I still think the ereader (or reading books on a screen to be more exact) is here to stay and wonderful. There's something magical about carrying around a library in my handbag...