by James Kanata

Created on: November 25, 2010   Last Updated: May 06, 2011

The dedicated portable electronic book or e-book reading device has developed a lot of press and interest recently, though it may surprise some to learn that the very first e-book reader was the SoftBook in 1998. For over a decade, publishers and hardware developers have been attempting to establish this market, and even today their efforts have been hampered by a lack of demand. Even with such online luminaries as Amazon trying to establish their own e-book reader it has not made it the success the company may have hoped for. The question that remains is why have e-book readers been so ineffectual against the humble paperback?

The first and often most cited reason is cost. The Amazon Kindle 3G costs $189[1] while the Sony Pocket Reader isn't much less at $149[2]. Even with in store discounts, you are looking easily at over $100 for an e-book device. This is quite a significant outlay for a piece of technology that is essentially a text file reader. For a little more, one can easily buy something with added functionality over book reading like a netbook. Even bearing in mind that costs will go down for these devices, one can still buy a handful of books for the cost of simply buying the reader. It's not just the readers that are expensive. The books themselves offer little discount over the price of a paperback equivalent, and with a number of inherent disadvantages over a paper copy.

Firstly, a lot of e-book formats have a lot of built in limitations. The use of DRM (Digital Rights Management) introduces a lot of barriers over how you may use your e-books. Some publishers on Amazon's Kindle marketplace dictate that their e-book can only be used by one device at any one time, meaning that you cannot use a second device (such as an iPhone) to download and read that e-book while it is on another device. This also means, naturally, that the perfectly legal and traditional custom of lending paper books becomes a legal gray area with e-books. 

This gray area comes from the way e-books are sold. Unlike paper based books that are owned by the purchaser, e-books are only licensed. So instead of owning the book outright, as you would with a hard copy, digital e-books are essentially only leased. While one can understand that publishers may want to guard against casual piracy, the result is that e-books are wholly unfair to the average consumer. Even DRM-free e-books still have certain limitations that make them unattractive for their price point. 

Secondly, and

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