Amazon sells ebook readers for less than $200

Amazon sells ebook readers for less than $200. More than 50,000 titles are available at online retailers. Are ebooks finally here?

Let’s pause to remember some of the missteps in this field. In 1999, Microsoft predicted the end of printed books, magazines, and newspapers within 20 years. According to their timeline, by now we should have seen one billion electronic ebook titles and by 2008 we were to expect ebook titles to outsell print titles.

It didn’t quite work that way. But new technologies are often overhyped and fail to meet expectations. Some of them do eventually deliver on their promises. CD drives in PCs and high definition TV (HDTV) were embarrassing failures in the 1990s, but CD drives are now standard equipment and HDTV looks like it just might make it this time.

So let’s reconsider ebooks. They’re much denser than a book, and a single ebook might hold a thousand text-only books. They can be downloaded within seconds. You can search them to find every instance of a particular phrase. Though the ebook equivalents of new books cost almost as much as the books themselves, the cost of goods is negligible.

On the other hand, you can mark up books and articles printed on paper. I can give you a book to read and not worry about whether you have a compatible reader. With much greater text quality and more words visible at a glance, paper is much easier to read. And if you lose a book or article, it’s not as great a loss as an expensive ebook reader would be.

So -- are ebooks finally here? I imagine that they will continue their slow inroads, perhaps on the backs of other successful devices such as iPods. They clearly have some advantages, but with this example we see a common trait with every revolutionary new technology: new products are never better than what they replace on every point.