In the E-book Wars, Color May be Superfluous
It's time for me to go out on a limb as the e-book market gets wild and wooly. E-readers are popping up everywhere; I even saw one for sale at my local drugstore, priced at about what you'd pay for a Kindle from Amazon. I wondered what was going on here. Can anyone make an e-reader that will satisfy the masses? Surely not, for years of research went into the first Kindle, with painstaking effort given to getting that ink-on-paper look that the product is so famous for showcasing. Can a drugstore model copy the same quality? Highly doubtful.
But the bigger question is: Does an e-reader really need color? At first, the question seemed laughable. Books are black-and-white in nature, unless you are talking about coffee-table volumes. And they belong, well, on the coffee table. Children's books remain a conundrum, but I ask you, are you really going to read your tot Runaway Bunny or Where the Wild Things Are from an e-book? Really? I went back and looked at some of the well-used volumes from my son's childhood and even from mine. They were tattered and well-loved, and also stained with liquids and foods of various sorts—milk, a cookie stain, and you don't want to know what. None of that is going to go well with an e-reader. Can you imagine a glass of hot chocolate tipping over on top of an iPad? Dad would short circuit. Books are best for reading to tots, and I doubt they will go out of print.
The 500-lb. gorilla in the room is the magazine. If it is true that in the future we are going start reading colorful magazines on e-readers, then color e-books are the clear winners. The new color nook, which critics have gone wild about, seems a clear winner here, for it renders magazines like National Geographic in a full, true spectrum. However, the news from an e-reader that's already been out there selling magazines, the iPad, is sobering. According to engadget.com, iPad has seen a steep decline in magazine sales in just a few short months. At first, there was a burst of excitement as people rushed to get magazines on their iPad. Wired was the leader with 31,000 downloads in its initial offering. But it's gone down to 22,000 and 23,000 downloads for September and October. Other magazines, such as Vanity Fair and GQ showed similar declines.
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