Amazon to try crummy e-book format again

YOU COULD CALL it a conundrum but one of the greatest successes of the internet age has been Amazon.com, a company that sells books – dye printed onto dead trees – that are then sent via the postal service in a franked package and delivered manually to your door.

And one of the great failures of the Internet age has been attempts to revolutionise the format by digitising the content and making it available at low cost in real time. Now, Amazon is trying to change that situation by launching its own e-book. But will it succeed?

The short answer is, 'nah, probably not,' but Amazon obviously feels differently as, according to CNet, it will launch its Kindle device on Monday in the magnificent city of New York, home of the many of the world’s greatest bars, notably The Old Town and Peter MacManus.

This effort has Wi-Fi, direct links to the Amazon site but it also packs one horrible feature – the price. If CNet is right, this thing will cost $399, a price that is crazy as a loon. Because e-books are such a bad idea that the only way these things will fly, or even have a prayer of flying, is if they’re giveaway cheap. Maybe a tenth of that price.

You can see why Amazon might be keen. If it can grab the digital book market the way it has grabbed the physical book market and flip the way people consume reading matter then it can rid itself of scads of costly infrastructure. No warehouses, not many pesky employees, almost zero supply chain.

But here are the problems:

Item: Paper is great. It’s very, very cheap and there’s plenty of spare capacity – witness the success of Lulu.com. It’s flexible, disposable and recyclable. If you lose your book you don’t report it to the police. Idiot friends might not return your precious volumes but it’s not like you’ve lent them your laptop.

Item: Your eyes aren’t cut out for staring into a light. It’s not a nice experience. Reading a book is an aesthetic, tactile pleasure and there is a micro-boom in expensive, gorgeous limited editions.

Item: Electronic equipment is fundamentally unreliable. Batteries run out, screens crack, storage media fail, and sometimes the damn thing just won’t turn on. Books lose a bit of gum and get mottled so the pages run out, but it doesn’t really matter as you can still read them. I have books that date back to before World War II. I own no other equipment that dates as far back apart from a house, and 99.999 per cent of that belongs to my mortgage lender.

Bottom line: E-books are handy for blokes up telegraph poles consulting compex manuals. They are very poor indeed for blokes sat at home with a calming drink, working their way through Our Mutual Friend.

The End. µ