A pico projector is an emerging technology that can beam large images from a miniscule machine. The word “pico” is used here in the sense of a picogram, a measurement the size of one trillionth of a gram. You’d perhaps unfold tiny tripod legs from the projector and aim it at a surface in front of you. Then you’d speak aloud the name of the book you want to read. If you don’t already own it, you’d be prompted to buy it, at which point it would download onto this tiny device and start projecting. You’d navigate by voice commands, and the device would be cloud-powered.
This sort of device could socialize reading by making a book available to you and a close circle of friends. I can see this being used in reading groups, university study groups, or of course, in the privacy of your own bedroom. The biggest benefit of this type of device is its cost. Shrink the surface area of a device down to nothing, and you’ve made a cheap, hands-free reading device.
Of course, you can take this line of thinking further and make Nooks and Kindles really, really cheap. Make them so cheap that you give them away.
I foresee a time when Barnes & Noble, for example, will do just that. Perhaps at first they’ll give Nooks away to people who buy a hundred dollars’ worth of books a year. The retailer benefits because it saves on shipping, and it introduces new segments of its reading marketplace into the Nook experience. As programs like this are more and more successful, and as the manufacturing costs of these slimmed-down, cheaper Nooks drop, Barnes & Noble can afford to give them away to even more people for free. So now people who only spend seventy dollars a year on books—or even fifty dollars a year—can get a free Nook.
Over time, more and more people have Nooks. More and more people are reading. And that’s good. Of course, these slimmed-down, cheaper Nooks are likely bare bones—no web browsing, no music or games, no bells, no whistles. But they’re sufficient for reading itself and serve as a gateway drug to larger, more functional Nooks that Barnes & Noble sells for a steeper price.
If other ebook retailers use this model too, then e-readers will become very prevalent. You’ll finally start to see e-readers in everyone’s hands on subways, at bus stops, or during lunch breaks at work. If disposable e-readers become possible, you could get a new one in the mail every year, with newer features and better screens.
It’s in Amazon’s and everyone else’s best interests to reduce the price of e-readers. This lets them increase the number of customers. Every twenty-dollar drop in price means legions of new customers for whom ebooks now become affordable. And in the final analysis, the logical price is free. Herbert Hoover once promised a chicken in every pot during the Depression, and in our own turbulent financial times, if e-readers are free, you’ll find a Nook in every house—and if not a Nook, then a Sony or a Kindle or even an Apple device.
Just as e-readers are changing, so is the nature of how we read. I joked about privacy concerns with the Microbook. But it’s not just people on the subway who can look over your shoulder at what you read. Retailers like Amazon or Apple can see every page turn and know every word you’ve highlighted, every annotation you’ve made. As you’re reading on your beach chair, a giant looms behind you with a clipboard, peering over your shoulder.
Every so often as we read, our cloud-connected e-readers report back home to notify the retailer about where we are in the book. This is often done so that if you have multiple devices, you can sync all devices to the same page. But this also lets retailers like Amazon and Apple know how far you’ve read through a given ebook. They’re able to monitor the progress you make. The information on reading patterns for a given ebook can be collected across multiple people, and the retailers can learn which ebooks were more successful. Do people abandon a given book halfway through? Is one particular chapter often skipped?
This information isn’t yet being used to target your personal reading habits, but the reading patterns across multiple people for a given book could be used by the retailers—and sold back to publishers—to improve the quality of a given ebook. Perhaps the chapter that was often skipped needed to be better edited or needed an illustration to help explain what was going on. Or if the book is often abandoned partway through, then perhaps the publisher takes this information into account when it’s time to renegotiate the author contract.
We’re not yet at the point where ads will be targeted to you based on the paragraph or sentence you’re currently reading, although Google does target ads to you if you’ve mentioned specific books, and Facebook’s platform allows advertisers to do the same. Still, I think many readers are comfortable with this intrusion into their privacy, especially if it means better ebook prices. So I can imagine free ebooks that are 100 percent ad subsidized. You get these ebooks for free, but the catch is that on the bottom of every page, you see a contextual ad, perhaps based on the content on that page or perhaps based on your own web-surfing habits on the internet.
It’s easy for retailers to serve ads to you across multiple websites. Ads are sticky, like cockroaches dipped in honey, and you can’t quite get rid of them. It may not be long before you start to see those same sticky ads following you around on your ebooks. But until then, I think that your reading privacy will only be bent to provide statistics back to publishers, in the way I just outlined. If this ultimately serves to make for better-designed ebooks, and we as readers are oblivious to the way this data is being used, then perhaps there’s no harm to us in the process. For now.
I mention the pico-projector e-reader as an example of the kind of disruptive hardware technology we may see in the years ahead. The future of ebooks is just getting started, after all. Lots of new technology will be coming to e-readers. Some types use organic crystals woven into intricate patterns or arranged in spirals. Some work like the wings on a butterfly, reflecting light at the right frequencies to reproduce full color. E-reader technology is an area of ongoing innovation, and the devices that will be out in just a couple of years will make existing eInk displays look like Edison’s wax cylinders.
Eventually, e-readers may get so cheap that they’re unprofitable for retailers to sell. That makes you wonder whether they’ll continue to be sold. But consider the history of razor blades.
In 1895, an inventor named King Gillette turned away from his architectural drawings of futuristic cities and utopias and hit on an idea for a new kind of razor. It took him ten years before he could manufacture them, but they were revolutionary. Instead of having to buy a razor blade and sharpen it before every use, you could buy reusable razor handles and disposable steel razor blades from Gillette. When the blades got dull, you just bought new ones. Gillette took a loss on every razor handle he sold. But what good is a handle without a blade? None at all, so he made a tidy profit on every blade he sold.
Using this as a metaphor, you might ask whether a given retailer is in business to sell razors or blades. I say the answer is both. In truth, ebooks and e-readers are part of the flywheel for any ebook retailer. You can’t sell content without a reader, and you can’t sell readers without content, so you need both.
No company can rest on its laurels yet and just focus on ebook content while letting the others provide the readers. Even Google ended up launching its own smartphone and tablet. Although there are challenges and pains that you go through as an organization to build out a device and the profit margin may not be high, by owning the reading experience at the hardware level, you can do things with content that no one else can.
Recent events have already shown that a retailer will take a loss on hardware if the content can make up for it in sales. For example, when Amazon released the Kindle Fire, an inexpensive tablet that could compete with Apple’s iPad, many manufacturing pundits believed that Amazon was losing money on every Kindle Fire it sold as a piece of hardware but was making up the balance on content sales. It was a brilliant business decision later mirrored by inexpensive e-reader tablets from Amazon’s competitors.