There’s a long and interesting article at Ars Technica from a guy who’s been in the ebook business for a long time. His point is, basically, that everyone has gotten it wrong for the last ten years, making the same mistakes, over and over. And the big players today are still making those mistakes.
He lists many of them, and most will sound familiar – Ebooks are too expensive;Â DRM hurts honest customers and doesn’t do a thing to stop piracy, which is a vastly overstated problem anyway;Â No one has tried anything really and truly new with ebooks.
It’s all a little depressing. I was hoping he’d get to some brilliant idea to save the book industry, but he never really does. But he gets it – he sees the ridiculous state of the industry now, stubbornly clinging to the old way of doing things instead of embracing all the new things you just couldn’t do before.
The world is still looking for publishing business models that work and will continue to work when all books are ebooks. Someone could make a lot of money . . .
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