Once the content is decoupled from the medium we can express an opinion about the preferred medium.  There is something quaint and comfortable about reading a printed book.  It’s the traditional way.  The smell, the feel, the weight all contribute to make reading a paper book a joyful, sensory experience.  Reading an electronic book just isn’t the same. It’s not better or worse, it’s just different.   When you read a really good book the medium isn’t going to have that much of an impact on whether or not you enjoyed the book.  The reaction to the content will far outweigh how you feel about the medium.  Is a bad book made better because you read it in printed form?  I’m going to guess that it doesn’t.

There are two types of advantages the ebooks have over printed books, those for the reader and those for the publisher.   Printing and distributing books costs a lot of money.  It’s an expensive process that doesn’t really scale well.  Once you reach a certain volume printing books is only marginally cheaper when you print more of the same book.  An ebook on the other hand costs as much for 10 as it does for 10,000 copies once you’ve met your overheads.   This reason alone will drive publishers to ebooks over printed books.  This is great news for authors as they’ll be able to make/sell more books.

It appears that consumers are already voting on which way they want to go.   According to Techcrunch : “Kindle eBook sales surpassed Amazon’s hardcover sales back in July 2010, and they surpassed paperback sales in January of this year [2011].”   In the last year  ebooks sales were 3X higher than the year before.

There is some amount of subjectiveness when it comes to evaluating e-books from the reader’s perspective.  The ability to randomly search for words or phrases is something you can’t do in a paper book but you can with an e-book.  How much value is that to the reader?  It’s hard to say.  It might be a little it might be a lot depending on the situation.  I can carry hundreds or thousands wherever I go with my e-reader.  This is not something you can easily do with printed books but how often would you really need to have access to your entire library especially if you can just google the content using Google books.  How this does help is if you are reading 2-3 books at one time which happens quite frequently  I’m not a very patient person so being able to acquire a book anytime, day or night is a bonus for me.  That has real value for me.  Ease of access whether for multiple books or one device or for getting new books makes an e-reader much more convenient than a printed book.  The ability to read the same book on multiple devices means you don’t ever need to be confronted with the situation where you left your book at home.

Lending electronic books today is hard.  Most books use some kind of digital rights management that makes lending them hard.  DRM free books are easy to lend.   This is a problem that needs to be solved.  It will probably get solved the way music rights were solved.   The music was pirated until the legal purchase got cheap and easy enough to make it better to buy than to steal.

Printed books aren’t going away tomorrow but they will become less available.  If everyone has access to an e-reader then why print the book at all?  As more people get e-readers there will be fewer and fewer reasons for a publisher to print books.

I didn’t even touch on the cost of books to libraries.   How much real estate is devoted to libraries just to house books?  If every book was digital how big would the library need to be?  Would we even need libraries?

There was a time when photographers used film because it was “better” than digital.   There aren’t fewer photographers because we don’t use film anymore.   This will be the case with authors.  There will be more books “published” the sooner we move to digital distribution. The barrier to entry will be lower.

So why has it taken me a week to buy a book from Kobo?  Here’s the short version.  I bought a book last Friday but couldn’t get past the preview.  I contacted support and the technician added the book to my library.  That didn’t fix the problem.  Rather than fighting with that problem I asked for a credit so I could buy a different book.  The credit was issued but I couldn’t see it. That’s when things got worse.

I called on Monday to ask about the credit and was told it would appear in my account at some point.  I had to be patient as they were experiencing heavy call volumes.   I called back on Tuesday and asked about the credit.  I was told that the credit was applied to my account.  I said that’s great but I can’t see it when I log in to my account.  The support technician assured me that the credit was there.  Well how do I get it?  I took a screen shot and sent that too her but that didn’t make a difference.  I was  told the problem would be escalated to tier two support.  Level one support is delivered from St. Lucia.  I don’t know where tier two is located but I couldn’t call them directly.    By this point I was VERY frustrated.

I am not a patient person.  Anyone who knows me will attest to this.   I wanted to call someone at Kobo directly but I couldn’t as they don’t make their phone number available on their website.  Kobo is a joint venture between Indigo and Borders.    Indigo being a Canadian company I thought I’d reach out to them and see if that helped and it did.

I spoke to a VP at Indigo and he was very helpful.  He was the only bright spot in this entire, ongoing,  saga.  The contact at Indigo has clearly spent most of his career in customer service, his Linked In profile backs this up.  I am very grateful for his help even though he doesn’t even work for Kobo.  I wish he was running Kobo’s support team!

My contact from Indigo followed up with me the next day and told me that he’d received word that the credit was in my account.  I told him that I’ve been told that before but I still can’t access it.  To prove my point I gave him my credentials and had him log in as me.  Once he did that he confirmed that I indeed he could not access my credit.   He was so helpful he forwarded another email to Kobo describing his experience and asking them to fix it.  Keep in mind this guy doesn’t even work for Kobo, that’s someone that understands customer service.

Later that night I tried to access my account again.  This time I received a 500, Internal Server Error message when I tried to view my account balance.  I guess the folks at Kobo were trying to fix something.

The next day I received a call, not from Kobo, but from my contact at Indigo.  Kobo had my phone number but chose to let someone else be the intermediary.  I was informed that Kobo has accepted that there is a problem and are now trying to resolve it.  Can you believe that it took a VP from an outside company to get Kobo to acknowledge they have an issue?  I find it hard to imagine that nobody else has ever had this problem before.

By this time it’s Wednesday and I still don’t have my book.  I guess I’ll just have to be patient.  I was now in contact via email directly with Kobo support and was told they’d call me Thursday morning but they didn’t.  I emailed on Friday morning and asked if they were going to call me and was told they would call within the hour and they did.  I was away from my phone but was able to call them back.

It’s crunch time!  I’ve got the support tech on the phone.  At the time I was in a parking lot talking on my Blackberry and accessing the web via my Playbook.  Darrell, the support technician that I was talking to told me the credit was in my account.  Ha!  I wasn’t falling for that again.  I had Darrell log in to my account and verify that he could see the credit and he could.  I had him proceed to buy the book while he was in my account and I was on the phone.  Problem solved, not!

After running my errand I got home and opened up my Kobo reader.  Guess what, I couldn’t get passed the introduction.  The very same problem I had last Friday that initiated this adventure in the first place.  Oh no, here we go again.

I quickly emailed the technician at Kobo and told him of the problem.  I received a response from Lee this time.   Lee’s response was “Being able to read only the first few pages of a title implies a “preview only” copy has been downloaded and/or the title is locked.”  I assumed that Lee didn’t know that it was Darrell that bought the full edition of the book.  Lee told me I’d hear back in 30 minutes and that was an hour ago.

When I emailed Lee back I told him I didn’t care what the problem was I just wanted a refund so I could buy the book elsewhere.  That’s what I said but really I just want to read the book in my Kobo reader.   I thought that maybe there is some kind of DRM issue with the Kobo app on my Playbook so I downloaded the Kobo desktop application.  I opened the desktop app and accessed my account.  I opened the book I’ve been trying to get all week and was able to get to the entire book.  Well now we know the problem isn’t with the book it’s with the app on the Playbook.   I’m not liking where this is headed.   It may be that reading Kobo books on my Playbook is not an option.

For more than a year I’ve been using my Sony Reader to read my electronic books.   Maybe this book will open on my Sony device.  That didn’t work either.   Unlike all other books that I’ve downloaded this one is sent as a zip file which seems to be unreadable by the Sony device. I have successfully added other Kobo books to my Sony device.  The fact that I could do that is one of the reasons I shopped at Kobo.

The fact that the Kobo application is available for the Playbook was a good thing for Kobo.  It has created some lock-in.  In most cases after a day of consumer frustration I would have switched companies.  I would have been buying from Amazon were it not for the fact that there is no Kindle app for my Playbook.  This could turn out to be bad news for RIM.  I have a Playbook for the applications not for the hardware.  If the apps aren’t available on the device then I’ll have to consider alternate hardware  (that isn’t likely to happen though as we have three Playbooks in the house).  I don’t want to be carrying my Playbook and my Sony Reader.

You know,  I never had these kinds of issues with a paper based book.  Maybe I should go back to that.

[note:  The events listed in this post took place from Friday, December 16 to Friday, December 23. ]

I recently bought a Playbook.   Software developers have been slow to develop for the Playbook.  As a result of this slow development I am not able to watch Netflix, listen to Audible or listen to music downloaded from iTunes.   I don’t blame RIM for this problem.  This isn’t a media player problem.  The Playbook comes with media players.  The problem is with the DRM.   There are Open Standards format for the media I want to consume it’s just that digital rights management prevents me from using the Open Standards.  Music and audiobooks can be played as MP3, movies can be played as MP4 or a streaming format.

Let’s get something clear, if I wanted to steal movies, music or books I’d already be doing so but I’m not, not yet anyway.  When will content creators wake up to the reality tbat DRM causes more revenue leakage than it prevents by forcing consumers to break the DRM in order to consume the media they have paid for?

From where I stand DRM sucks!

I have held off buying an iPhone because I didn’t buy in to the Cult of Steve.   It’s starting to seem like that’s not reason enough to stick with the Blackberry.   The photo apps alone make the iPhone very appealing for a photographer.

I’ll have my Torch for a while yet but I’ll be giving an iPhone serious consideration when it comes time to switch.    I’ve tried to be loyal but you lost your way.   A friend once said to me that when your only tool is a hammer all your problems look like nails.  I think this is what happened to RIM.  When all you have is the phone you want to solve all your problems with a better phone.  Unfortunately for RIM the phone is just a platform.  The apps are driving my decision to contemplate the iPhone. Sorry RIM.

It turns the stop sign I wanted moved was not the only one under review.  There is a stop sign at Country Club Drive and Burnett Avenue.   The residents of Burnett turned up in force to the council meeting and created a hue and cry about removal of the stop sign.  Once again the knee jerk reaction of politicians, including the councilor for my ward, Nicholas Ermeta, was to side with the citizens.   If the professionals at the City review traffic flow and feel a sign should be removed or changed shouldn’t we let that happen?

One of the residents was quoted as saying “accidents are already happening and will only increase if these signs are removed”.  Is there any proof to substantiate this claim?  Research has shown that stop signs do not work as a traffic calming technique.  Unnecessary stop signs tend to have the opposite effect.

The fact that Townline Road is closed for 16 weeks is putting a lot more traffic on to Burnett.   The presence of the stop sign at Country Club Drive creates a backlog on Burnett the frequent extends to the intersection at Can-Amera Parkway.  How does this increase the likelihood of a collision at this intersection?

I’ve intiated some research with the Waterloo Police Services to find out just how many accidents happen on Burnett.  I’d like to know if there truly is an increase in accidents.

The Cambridge Stop Sign Saga continues.