Nick Jones

I’m encouraged by the suggestions that ASUS may release a low cost two screen e-book reader in Europe. However, despite this I’m still not going to sell all my bookcases and go electronic. One reason is I just worked out that I can’t afford it. Let’s do some sums here…..

First the cost of e-books. A quick calculation based on bookshelf capacity suggests my wife and I have over 3,500 books scattered around the house, I’d guess at least two thirds are recent enough that they’re still in copyright. Probably half the books are ones we both read, so if we both had an e-book reader we’d need two licenses for current volumes. So if we assume $10 per e-book that works out at about $34,500 to replace p-books with e-books assuming equivalent volumes were available. And that also assumes the out-of-copyright books are free, which is probably over-optimistic.

E-book readers are going to get a lot of use, so they’ll probably only last a couple of years, therefore we’d have to pay a few hundred dollars each every two years to get a new reader. (In reality we probably need two readers each, a big A4 one at home and a small one for planes and travelling, but the DRM models haven’t caught up with that need yet). And when e-book file formats evolve or we switch reader brand to something with different DRM then in the worst case we’d have to spend tens of thousands again to replace the e-books with new more modern ones. No way.

Buying the e-books isn’t the end of the story. Even if we make the unrealistic assumption that we could obtain e-versions of all the books that we currently own that’s a lot more books than will fit on a reader like a Kindle. So we’re going to have to maintain offline copies somewhere. I could (maybe) trust a cloud service provider with this job, but I don’t like that option for reasons I discussed a while back. If I own e-books on digital media I’m going to have to maintain backups, and keep refreshing them. My colleague Valdis Fikis pointed out that so-called “persistent” media isn’t really that persistent compared to the life of a book. He estimates the following media lifetimes:

Hard disk: 3 to 5 years

DVD or CD: Up to 7 years if you buy a good quality product, less if you’re a cheapskate

Tape: (yes, it still exists), 7 to 10 years if you treat it kindly

So every few years I’ll need to remember to copy my e-book library. iPod has shown us just how painful it can be to back up and restore media libraries or transfer DRM protected media from one device to another. And I just don’t want that hassle. Books don’t deteriorate, just blow off the dust and they can be as good as they were a hundred years before.

In Gartner we talk a lot about total cost of ownership (TCO), but I think in the consumer product space we ought also to talk about total pain of ownership (TPO), And for me both the TCO and TPO of e-books are way too high. Old-fashioned p-books are more robust, lower cost and a lot easier to own. I’m much more likely to buy an e-book reader as an alternative to all the magazines and newspapers which I read once and throw away. That would not only be more convenient but also more environmentally responsible.