Fora.tv video – Industry experts on the E-Reader War

A panel of distinguished guests discuss the technology and use of Readers, e-books etc. It has many good insights. They cover pretty much what the prosumer, the publishers, and the futurists are all thinking.

Some interesting points of several of the panelists. Not that I agree with all of it.  But it’s a good insight into some industry heads and spokespeople.

My favorite points:

• The Kindle is not going to last, according to several in the panel.
• User testing show that people prefer a nice paginated interface with beautiful reflowable text (not scrolling, pagination)
• Competition with Amazon is a good thing.
• Reading on the iPhone or Mobile device is a win for many because you don’t have to make a separate decision to take that device with you like you would with another larger device.
• Amazon underpriced E-Books to help standardize their device.  This is an ignorant point, they underpriced E-Books? Sorry, people have stated repeatedly, the “golden price” for Ebooks is more in the $5 range, not $9.99. A book download costs virtually nothing. These prices are fixed.
• The group can’t seem to clarify what advertising could be, or at least they didn’t discuss specifics. How it can be done is obvious, the challenge is just pricing it.
• In the future, books will all be crowd sourced from within smaller communities. No more will it be the lone hermit author who disappears for a year and returns with a finished book.
• Contrary to what you might have heard, the amount of book sales that are actually down? 3%  That’s it. And that 3% picked up from the sales of Ebooks.  Ebooks picked up the slack.
• Now is the time to buy newspaper and magazine companies, says the investment banker. =)
• Traditional media companies are not good at product development
• Payment systems don’t seem to be clear with people without a micro payment system.
• A smart move is to focus on community and collaboration.
• Purchasing a short story is now convenient – bought like a song. These forms are financially feasible. Certain long form articles too. People will pay for what they want.
• In 3 years the ownership of smart phones will exceed the install base of PCs

What I don’t like about this discussion was there was no talk of specific gadgets except for the iPhone and the iPad, oh and the Kindle. They acknowledged a rush of new devices, but don’t seem to be paying attention to the ecosystem. They didn’t go into specifics of unique possibilities on enhanced books. Books with Video clips is as far as they went. Is that all people can see?  A book page with an embedded video?  And how they might be developed. Nothing about self-publishing either, other than the positive comment on short story writers.

These are great times for experts to get specialty books out to SO MANY more people and to gain the most per unit that authors ever had, because they can charge what they like and distribute using simple ecommerce.  A small team could create the book and enhance it, giving it a more attractive position over a publishers book.