Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With tech stuff from how stuff Works dot com. Hi, everybody, welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Polette. I'm an editor here and How Stuff Works sitting next to me as usual as senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Hey there, Chris. Download any good books lately. As a matter of fact, I have, Well, I didn't expect that to actually work well. As you can tell, we're going to talk about electronic books today or e books, right. Um. I think we were inspired to do this because we, uh, we just recently put an article up on our website that somebody who wrote that that would be yeah, about the Amazon about the self promotion. Yeah, yeah, I wrote an article about the Amazon Kindle. But before we get into e book readers, because I mean that's really just part of the story, I guess we can talk about e books themselves. Um. Now, of course, electronic books, that's just it's a book in electronic format, so that you read it with an electric an electronic device such as a computer or an e book reader or an iPhone or whatever. Right, it's just it's an electronic device that can access this sort of file and display it. And they were kind of it's interesting, it's actually kind of slow to catch on, um, considering that you know, we we we really got the Worldwide Web back in what like essentially and uh, and it was all text back then, there were hardly any graphics and uh. And yet the idea of using the Internet to distribute books took a while. Um. There was a lot of a lot of publishers kind of dragging their feet on the whole issue. And in fact, I remember, back in two thousand you may remember this as well, Chris Um. There was a very famous author who kind of made a splash about trying to do an electronic book publication UM strategy that hadn't really been done before. I'm talking about Stephen King. Do you remember this at all? Um? Actually knowing? Okay, So back in two thousand, he first he released and a novella, which of course is longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. It's called Writing the Bullet And he really published that electronically so you could download that and read it, you know, whenever. Um. And then he decided he was going to try something new. He was going to try and publish a book chapter by chapter, offering each chapter up for download for I think it was originally I think it was a dollar or a chapter. And uh, he said that he was going to monitor how many people downloaded the book, and as long as seventy of the people who downloaded the book, we're paying for the book. He would continue to write. Okay, now I'm starting to remember that now, and if it dipped below, game over. He stops. So first chapter comes out and apparently he does more than of the business, and so people actually pay for it. And uh, then the second chapter comes out and dipped a little bit. I think it actually hits seventent but then went ahead and did the third chapter, fourth chapter. As I recall, he doubles the price. Now it's two bucks for the chapter, but he also doubles the output, so it's about twice as many pages as you would have received in one of the previous installments. Um. I think it only got up to six chapters, and then it stopped in in two thousand. Uh and since then there's been no progress on the plant, just the name of the book. UM. So that experiment kind of fizzled, but I think it laid the groundwork for the electronic books uh industry that we see today. It's just that it was one of those early tempts that didn't quite make it. Now there have been other publishers who have tried different experiments like that, and usually I think it's based on the the will of the author trying to you know, get the experiments started, people like Corey doctor Oh especially. I think the most recent effort, to a Little Brother, it did pretty well after making it available on you know, for free on digital download, It's still sold a lot of copies. Neil Gaiman has also offered some of his work um online for free. My wife's gonna kill me because I forgot the name of the author, but the author of the Dresden Files um. He always or seems to always uh offer up the first few chapters of whichever novel has just come out for free, so that it's essentially you can get a chance to get hooked into the story. Now it's just the first few chapters, so you still have to go out and buy a copy of the book. But it has been a very effective way of of getting new readers. Yes, he wouldn't if you will Butcher, Yes, Jim Butcher, thank you, thank you. Yes. Now my wife will only name me instead of kill me. Well, you know, I'm also a fan of the books. She she's the mega fan, and I'm also a fan. But there are other ones as well who do the same sort of thing that they authors either put up an entire book or part of a book as a way to but not but that's still usually a way to sell the physical book. Yeah, it's it's sort of a way to whet the appetite being offers. A science fiction publisher offers free books UM for download UM from time to time, and a lot of times those are the first in a series. UM Tour, another science fiction fantasy publisher did that not too long ago, And when you asked me the question, it hadn't been that long ago that I downloaded six or seven e books from there, UM and UM. Actually, at one point McGraw hill, the educational publisher, was offering something that they called beta books. Now, last time I went on the site, I don't think they're doing this the same way they used to, but they were offering UM pre printed versions of the book. The point was it was in beta, it was unfinished. Um, if you had a correction that you saw, you know, hey, wow, this thing is completely wrong. What you mean to do is here? Or there's a type of in this page, you could actually contact McGraw hill and let them know, which was kind of a different thing. But you still got access to that content, which was, you know, pretty cool. Yeah, but most of these are offered in PDF format or um, you know, the Windows Reader format, which has been the sort of the de facto the two de facto standards for for e books over you know, the course of the bookdom mainly because most people are reading them on their computers until the Amazon Kindle came along. Really well sort of, Oh you had other e book readers before, but I don't think they had the same sort of They didn't get the same sort of press or adoption rates as the Kindle, although it's arguable whether or not the Kindles even had a really high adoption rate because hardly anyone ever seems to see them. Well, Um, the two I first came in contact with him, We're talking more than ten years ago, um, are the Rocket Book and the Soft Book, both of which were very early designs. They basically supported text, and they had LCD screens. UM. And uh, they probably would seem more primitive to those familiar with the Amazon Kindle because you had to hook him up to your computer. Um, you know, the battery life was twenty hours. You know. Stuff like that really just didn't catch on, even though some of them, one of them had a leather cover, uh to design, and one of them was actually the size about the size of a paperback book. You'd think maybe, you know, some people would buy it, but it really just didn't take off. I'm and in a matter of fact, you may those of you listening may never have heard of these just simply because they just didn't get depressed. And I well, I think it goes beyond just the I think it goes beyond just the press issue. UM. I think for a lot of people, particularly of our generation or older, UM, it's hard to imagine replacing the experience of reading a physical book with an electronic version. Um. There's certain things that you just associate with reading. You associate that the feel of the paper or even the smell of a book, and they seem like kind of silly things to talk about. But I think I think for some people it really is part of what they associate with, you know, reading a book, and if you don't have that, it doesn't really feel like you're reading. Um. Also, things like the l c D screens they tend to to cause a lot of eye strain, so after you were it's just like if you've been staring at a computer all day long. Do you have any idea what that's like, Chris, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do too. And after you've been staring at a computer for a while, you do get ice train, you know, your eyes get tired. And that was part of the problem with some of these earlier e book readers as well. They used the same sort of technology that you would find in an l c D computer screen. And UM, so yeah, that I think I played a factor into the whole slow adoption rate as well, where yeah, you have the availability, but the technology just didn't appeal to people quite as much. Yep. And I think that's why the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle, which are the current generation of e book readers. Um, that's a big part of it is. Uh, this little company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Inc. Yep. I love the inc. I actually have. I I don't have an electronic book reader. But I have messed with the Sony Reader in a Border's bookstore, um, which is one the retail outlets that you can find them in. And you should at least take a look at it, because the INC is completely different from l C. D UM. Basically, inside the display of a Sony Reader or an Amazon Kindle, what you have are little capsules, and inside the little capsules are more little capsules that are floating in a liquid. Um on on either side of the larger capsule is uh an electronic um yeah, an electrode and uh yeah, which is the funny name for them. It's okay, I just wrote the article, Chris, It's all right, all right. Um So, what happens is you put a positive or a negative charge and it draws the little capsules inside, which have pigment in them, to one side or another, and you can actually, uh by fine tuning that charge, you can actually make different shades of gray or black or white, and you form pictures and letters. And that's how that's why it looks like INK, I mean really kind of is INC. And uh so it it's designed so that there's no backlight to these screens. Um. So it looks to your eye kind of the same way as what if you were looking at a piece of paper with ink on it. It's really remarkable the similarity. I mean, if you've ever looked at it, did that experiment in science class where you had to look at a piece of newsprint under a microscope, you could see that it's you know, made up of tiny little dots. Yeah, it's the same principle, really. Yeah, it really works very very similarly. And the the nice thing also is that it takes less energy to run one of these devices than it would for an LCD screen because it's not powering a backlight. Essentially, it only needs to exert energy whenever you're changing a page, when you're changing an image, Like if you're not just changing a page, but if you were like increasing the font size or whatever, it would have to exert some it would have to exert some energy in order to to make the change visible. But between those it doesn't have to use up any electricity, So you have a battery charge that lasts a longer time. In fact, the Kindle Amazon claims the Kindle can last for more than a week on a single charge. If you're just you know, reading books if you're not using the wireless capability. That's We should probably also talk a little bit about the differences between the Kindle and the and the Sony book Reader. The Kindle is a wireless device and it uh it works really well with Amazon's Electronic bookstore, so you can purchase books directly from your Kindle and have them download straight to the device. You don't have to sink it with a computer. Um. You can connect it to a computer and transfer files over from the computer to the Kindle, but it's not necessary for the Kindle to work. Uh. The Sony one is different. You have to sink that with your computer. But on the flip side, the new version of the Sony e Reader has a touch screen, which the Kindle does not, and you can even change pages by swiping your finger across the screen, which to a lot of people that's that's so much more attractive than pushing a button. Um. For one thing, it kind of brings back that feeling that you're reading a book, you know, you're turning a page. Uh. For another, the Amazon One of the criticisms that the Amazon Kindle has a has had over the brief period of its life is that the button placement is such that if you pick up a kindle, you're almost guaranteed to accidentally turn the page because the buttons are on the side of it, so you don't you know, you're trying to put your hands in such a way where you're not covering up the screen or smudging the screen, but that means you're touching the sides. That's where all the next page or or previous page buttons are found. And they're large, so it's very easy to accidentally hit one of those and then next thing you know, you're on the wrong page. Um. So yeah, they each have their own merits and their own drawbacks. UM. I think they're both, from what I've seen, very good devices. I think they're both also probably a little more expensive than the average consumer would care to spend for something that they would think of, Hey, this just this just lets me read books. Um. The Kindle I know is I think three right now, and that's all unless you use Oprah Winfree's coupon, in which case it's it's three oh nine. Oprah Winfree uh called the Kindle her favorite gadget recently, and I'm sure that gave a nice boost to Kindle sales. Um. The Sony one I think is a I believe the new one is going to be four hundred. Well, um, but that's you. You bring up an interesting point because neither of these is just an e book anymore because they both um, they both handle a variety of files. Um, and both of them play music, right. Um you can listen to uh MP three's on on either one of them, so you can listen to an audible book on your book reading device. UM. And uh you know, the Kindle can download our s feeds and uh you can also get newspapers and things on their teams. So yeah, I mean it's uh, these are much more sophisticated than those those very early e book readers. UM. And talking about price, that's one of those things that people who are particularly critical of the e books I think UM really point out is you know, hey, I got to spend three or four h dollars for this machine, and on top of that, I'm paying full price for the books because in the bookstores, essentially you're not really getting a discount at least not much of a discount on on electronic books themselves. So UM, you know that's something that you have to to weigh. Now there are conveniences too. You can take a whole library full of stuff in your backpack and it doesn't weigh anymore than the electronic reader. Um, which is nice if you're going on a trip or UM. You know, they've been talking for a long time about students who could download textbooks. You could have a stack of xbooks and not have to worry about it. Are people who use a lot of literature, like UM, physicians or lawyers who are going to have to carry lots and lots of documents and lots of books for reference. This is a great thing for them. Um. Then again, those materials, I'm not sure how much of that is available because it seems like the majority of this stuff I've seen is entertainment. Right. Yeah. The the kindle can hold, according to Amazon, up to two hundred titles, so when you think about that you can carry it's the same as being able to carry two hundred books wherever you go. And there's a capacity for smart cards, so you can hold even more than that. Really and um, and not only that, but you can delete the stuff that's on your kindle and it actually still exists on a on a online cloud. Computing kind of UM account, so you can always download it again for no additional charge because you've already purchased the book. So yeah, you've got this potentially unlimited library that you can carry around with you because since again since it's wireless, you could always download a book that you already purchased and to lead another one whatever you want to do. UM. So the convenience factor definitely is there. The question about the price is a big one, the price of the individual books UM. From a publisher standpoint, uh, I'm sure it has to be a little frightening because theoretically an author could bypass a publisher completely and self published and allow, you know, sell these electronic books on his or her own website. Now, the author would have to pay for hosting services and probably for bandwidth as well as people downloaded the book. But on the other hand, the author would get to keep pretty much all the profit. I mean right now, I can tell you from uh, from my own experience. I'm the son of authors, both of my parents that are published authors and uh son of two authors actually, but uh, the others do not get to keep a percent of the profits from their books. Actually, the percentage is very small in comparison to them to what the public publisher gets, and they don't get to keep the copyrights either. And because they've publisher the now you can't sit there and call the publishers necessarily like big, mean, greedy people because they're they're very real costs associated with publishing. I mean, you're talking about using hard uh materials to create books. So you're talking about paper, and you're talking about ink, and you're talking about a the actual printers, distribution, marketing, marketing. Yeah, all of these things are just money, right and UH, now e books takes a lot of that and eliminates it. You don't have to worry about production costs as much. You have to worry about hosting, and you have to worry about bandwidth. Uh, marketing can be a lot more simple when you're using just electronic versions of marketing. You know, social networks things like email, Twitter or newsletters, that kind of stuff. Um, it has the potential to really kick publishing in the pants, which I think is another reason why we see the e book phenomenon taking longer than you would imagine it would take. Because I don't know that a lot of publishers are really eager to jump on that train. Just yet, there's still a little wary of where this is going to go. Sure, and for good reason. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there are plenty of good reasons from a business perspective to be a little nervous now, granted, if they can find a way to capitalize on that, to monetize it. Um. First of all, I don't think that physical books are ever going to go away. Uh. They just have to make sure that they are able to balance it out just right so that they produce enough physical books to meet that demand without overproducing and then operating at a loss. And also a way to monetize the electronic books so that it makes sense from a financial standpoint to offer both. Um. If they can find that, then you know they've hit the holy grail. Which is what's interesting is this doesn't apply just to to publishing. You could say that online distribution, I mean, that's going to be the future of delivering entertainment and information. It already is to a large extent here. But you're you're not just going to see this in the journalism and publishing. You're going to see it in television because and it's already happening in television and music, movies. All these things are are looking at online distribution as the next big thing, and it's either the next big scary thing or the next big this is awesome. We're all really filthy rich thing. I'm for the last one. I would uh yeah, I would not object to being filthy rich right now, you're just filthy. Yeah. I hear that. I hear that wealth is a burden, but it's one I'm willing to bear. All right, then, well, I guess we've pretty much covered this topic from from start to finish. I think cover to cover, cover to cover, nice good one. I think it's time to turn the page. That you were ahead, You were ahead, and now you're behind again. But if you want to learn more about e books, you can read lots of articles such as how the Amazon Kindle works. That's gonna be lie at how stuff works dot com and we'll talk to you again really soon. But more on this and thousands of other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you

Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With tech stuff from how stuff Works dot com. Hi, everybody, welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Polette. I'm an editor here and How Stuff Works sitting next to me as usual as senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Hey there, Chris. Download any good books lately. As a matter of fact, I have, Well, I didn't expect that to actually work well. As you can tell, we're going to talk about electronic books today or e books, right. Um. I think we were inspired to do this because we, uh, we just recently put an article up on our website that somebody who wrote that that would be yeah, about the Amazon about the self promotion. Yeah, yeah, I wrote an article about the Amazon Kindle. But before we get into e book readers, because I mean that's really just part of the story, I guess we can talk about e books themselves. Um. Now, of course, electronic books, that's just it's a book in electronic format, so that you read it with an electric an electronic device such as a computer or an e book reader or an iPhone or whatever. Right, it's just it's an electronic device that can access this sort of file and display it. And they were kind of it's interesting, it's actually kind of slow to catch on, um, considering that you know, we we we really got the Worldwide Web back in what like essentially and uh, and it was all text back then, there were hardly any graphics and uh. And yet the idea of using the Internet to distribute books took a while. Um. There was a lot of a lot of publishers kind of dragging their feet on the whole issue. And in fact, I remember, back in two thousand you may remember this as well, Chris Um. There was a very famous author who kind of made a splash about trying to do an electronic book publication UM strategy that hadn't really been done before. I'm talking about Stephen King. Do you remember this at all? Um? Actually knowing? Okay, So back in two thousand, he first he released and a novella, which of course is longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. It's called Writing the Bullet And he really published that electronically so you could download that and read it, you know, whenever. Um. And then he decided he was going to try something new. He was going to try and publish a book chapter by chapter, offering each chapter up for download for I think it was originally I think it was a dollar or a chapter. And uh, he said that he was going to monitor how many people downloaded the book, and as long as seventy of the people who downloaded the book, we're paying for the book. He would continue to write. Okay, now I'm starting to remember that now, and if it dipped below, game over. He stops. So first chapter comes out and apparently he does more than of the business, and so people actually pay for it. And uh, then the second chapter comes out and dipped a little bit. I think it actually hits seventent but then went ahead and did the third chapter, fourth chapter. As I recall, he doubles the price. Now it's two bucks for the chapter, but he also doubles the output, so it's about twice as many pages as you would have received in one of the previous installments. Um. I think it only got up to six chapters, and then it stopped in in two thousand. Uh and since then there's been no progress on the plant, just the name of the book. UM. So that experiment kind of fizzled, but I think it laid the groundwork for the electronic books uh industry that we see today. It's just that it was one of those early tempts that didn't quite make it. Now there have been other publishers who have tried different experiments like that, and usually I think it's based on the the will of the author trying to you know, get the experiments started, people like Corey doctor Oh especially. I think the most recent effort, to a Little Brother, it did pretty well after making it available on you know, for free on digital download, It's still sold a lot of copies. Neil Gaiman has also offered some of his work um online for free. My wife's gonna kill me because I forgot the name of the author, but the author of the Dresden Files um. He always or seems to always uh offer up the first few chapters of whichever novel has just come out for free, so that it's essentially you can get a chance to get hooked into the story. Now it's just the first few chapters, so you still have to go out and buy a copy of the book. But it has been a very effective way of of getting new readers. Yes, he wouldn't if you will Butcher, Yes, Jim Butcher, thank you, thank you. Yes. Now my wife will only name me instead of kill me. Well, you know, I'm also a fan of the books. She she's the mega fan, and I'm also a fan. But there are other ones as well who do the same sort of thing that they authors either put up an entire book or part of a book as a way to but not but that's still usually a way to sell the physical book. Yeah, it's it's sort of a way to whet the appetite being offers. A science fiction publisher offers free books UM for download UM from time to time, and a lot of times those are the first in a series. UM Tour, another science fiction fantasy publisher did that not too long ago, And when you asked me the question, it hadn't been that long ago that I downloaded six or seven e books from there, UM and UM. Actually, at one point McGraw hill, the educational publisher, was offering something that they called beta books. Now, last time I went on the site, I don't think they're doing this the same way they used to, but they were offering UM pre printed versions of the book. The point was it was in beta, it was unfinished. Um, if you had a correction that you saw, you know, hey, wow, this thing is completely wrong. What you mean to do is here? Or there's a type of in this page, you could actually contact McGraw hill and let them know, which was kind of a different thing. But you still got access to that content, which was, you know, pretty cool. Yeah, but most of these are offered in PDF format or um, you know, the Windows Reader format, which has been the sort of the de facto the two de facto standards for for e books over you know, the course of the bookdom mainly because most people are reading them on their computers until the Amazon Kindle came along. Really well sort of, Oh you had other e book readers before, but I don't think they had the same sort of They didn't get the same sort of press or adoption rates as the Kindle, although it's arguable whether or not the Kindles even had a really high adoption rate because hardly anyone ever seems to see them. Well, Um, the two I first came in contact with him, We're talking more than ten years ago, um, are the Rocket Book and the Soft Book, both of which were very early designs. They basically supported text, and they had LCD screens. UM. And uh, they probably would seem more primitive to those familiar with the Amazon Kindle because you had to hook him up to your computer. Um, you know, the battery life was twenty hours. You know. Stuff like that really just didn't catch on, even though some of them, one of them had a leather cover, uh to design, and one of them was actually the size about the size of a paperback book. You'd think maybe, you know, some people would buy it, but it really just didn't take off. I'm and in a matter of fact, you may those of you listening may never have heard of these just simply because they just didn't get depressed. And I well, I think it goes beyond just the I think it goes beyond just the press issue. UM. I think for a lot of people, particularly of our generation or older, UM, it's hard to imagine replacing the experience of reading a physical book with an electronic version. Um. There's certain things that you just associate with reading. You associate that the feel of the paper or even the smell of a book, and they seem like kind of silly things to talk about. But I think I think for some people it really is part of what they associate with, you know, reading a book, and if you don't have that, it doesn't really feel like you're reading. Um. Also, things like the l c D screens they tend to to cause a lot of eye strain, so after you were it's just like if you've been staring at a computer all day long. Do you have any idea what that's like, Chris, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do too. And after you've been staring at a computer for a while, you do get ice train, you know, your eyes get tired. And that was part of the problem with some of these earlier e book readers as well. They used the same sort of technology that you would find in an l c D computer screen. And UM, so yeah, that I think I played a factor into the whole slow adoption rate as well, where yeah, you have the availability, but the technology just didn't appeal to people quite as much. Yep. And I think that's why the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle, which are the current generation of e book readers. Um, that's a big part of it is. Uh, this little company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Inc. Yep. I love the inc. I actually have. I I don't have an electronic book reader. But I have messed with the Sony Reader in a Border's bookstore, um, which is one the retail outlets that you can find them in. And you should at least take a look at it, because the INC is completely different from l C. D UM. Basically, inside the display of a Sony Reader or an Amazon Kindle, what you have are little capsules, and inside the little capsules are more little capsules that are floating in a liquid. Um on on either side of the larger capsule is uh an electronic um yeah, an electrode and uh yeah, which is the funny name for them. It's okay, I just wrote the article, Chris, It's all right, all right. Um So, what happens is you put a positive or a negative charge and it draws the little capsules inside, which have pigment in them, to one side or another, and you can actually, uh by fine tuning that charge, you can actually make different shades of gray or black or white, and you form pictures and letters. And that's how that's why it looks like INK, I mean really kind of is INC. And uh so it it's designed so that there's no backlight to these screens. Um. So it looks to your eye kind of the same way as what if you were looking at a piece of paper with ink on it. It's really remarkable the similarity. I mean, if you've ever looked at it, did that experiment in science class where you had to look at a piece of newsprint under a microscope, you could see that it's you know, made up of tiny little dots. Yeah, it's the same principle, really. Yeah, it really works very very similarly. And the the nice thing also is that it takes less energy to run one of these devices than it would for an LCD screen because it's not powering a backlight. Essentially, it only needs to exert energy whenever you're changing a page, when you're changing an image, Like if you're not just changing a page, but if you were like increasing the font size or whatever, it would have to exert some it would have to exert some energy in order to to make the change visible. But between those it doesn't have to use up any electricity, So you have a battery charge that lasts a longer time. In fact, the Kindle Amazon claims the Kindle can last for more than a week on a single charge. If you're just you know, reading books if you're not using the wireless capability. That's We should probably also talk a little bit about the differences between the Kindle and the and the Sony book Reader. The Kindle is a wireless device and it uh it works really well with Amazon's Electronic bookstore, so you can purchase books directly from your Kindle and have them download straight to the device. You don't have to sink it with a computer. Um. You can connect it to a computer and transfer files over from the computer to the Kindle, but it's not necessary for the Kindle to work. Uh. The Sony one is different. You have to sink that with your computer. But on the flip side, the new version of the Sony e Reader has a touch screen, which the Kindle does not, and you can even change pages by swiping your finger across the screen, which to a lot of people that's that's so much more attractive than pushing a button. Um. For one thing, it kind of brings back that feeling that you're reading a book, you know, you're turning a page. Uh. For another, the Amazon One of the criticisms that the Amazon Kindle has a has had over the brief period of its life is that the button placement is such that if you pick up a kindle, you're almost guaranteed to accidentally turn the page because the buttons are on the side of it, so you don't you know, you're trying to put your hands in such a way where you're not covering up the screen or smudging the screen, but that means you're touching the sides. That's where all the next page or or previous page buttons are found. And they're large, so it's very easy to accidentally hit one of those and then next thing you know, you're on the wrong page. Um. So yeah, they each have their own merits and their own drawbacks. UM. I think they're both, from what I've seen, very good devices. I think they're both also probably a little more expensive than the average consumer would care to spend for something that they would think of, Hey, this just this just lets me read books. Um. The Kindle I know is I think three right now, and that's all unless you use Oprah Winfree's coupon, in which case it's it's three oh nine. Oprah Winfree uh called the Kindle her favorite gadget recently, and I'm sure that gave a nice boost to Kindle sales. Um. The Sony one I think is a I believe the new one is going to be four hundred. Well, um, but that's you. You bring up an interesting point because neither of these is just an e book anymore because they both um, they both handle a variety of files. Um, and both of them play music, right. Um you can listen to uh MP three's on on either one of them, so you can listen to an audible book on your book reading device. UM. And uh you know, the Kindle can download our s feeds and uh you can also get newspapers and things on their teams. So yeah, I mean it's uh, these are much more sophisticated than those those very early e book readers. UM. And talking about price, that's one of those things that people who are particularly critical of the e books I think UM really point out is you know, hey, I got to spend three or four h dollars for this machine, and on top of that, I'm paying full price for the books because in the bookstores, essentially you're not really getting a discount at least not much of a discount on on electronic books themselves. So UM, you know that's something that you have to to weigh. Now there are conveniences too. You can take a whole library full of stuff in your backpack and it doesn't weigh anymore than the electronic reader. Um, which is nice if you're going on a trip or UM. You know, they've been talking for a long time about students who could download textbooks. You could have a stack of xbooks and not have to worry about it. Are people who use a lot of literature, like UM, physicians or lawyers who are going to have to carry lots and lots of documents and lots of books for reference. This is a great thing for them. Um. Then again, those materials, I'm not sure how much of that is available because it seems like the majority of this stuff I've seen is entertainment. Right. Yeah. The the kindle can hold, according to Amazon, up to two hundred titles, so when you think about that you can carry it's the same as being able to carry two hundred books wherever you go. And there's a capacity for smart cards, so you can hold even more than that. Really and um, and not only that, but you can delete the stuff that's on your kindle and it actually still exists on a on a online cloud. Computing kind of UM account, so you can always download it again for no additional charge because you've already purchased the book. So yeah, you've got this potentially unlimited library that you can carry around with you because since again since it's wireless, you could always download a book that you already purchased and to lead another one whatever you want to do. UM. So the convenience factor definitely is there. The question about the price is a big one, the price of the individual books UM. From a publisher standpoint, uh, I'm sure it has to be a little frightening because theoretically an author could bypass a publisher completely and self published and allow, you know, sell these electronic books on his or her own website. Now, the author would have to pay for hosting services and probably for bandwidth as well as people downloaded the book. But on the other hand, the author would get to keep pretty much all the profit. I mean right now, I can tell you from uh, from my own experience. I'm the son of authors, both of my parents that are published authors and uh son of two authors actually, but uh, the others do not get to keep a percent of the profits from their books. Actually, the percentage is very small in comparison to them to what the public publisher gets, and they don't get to keep the copyrights either. And because they've publisher the now you can't sit there and call the publishers necessarily like big, mean, greedy people because they're they're very real costs associated with publishing. I mean, you're talking about using hard uh materials to create books. So you're talking about paper, and you're talking about ink, and you're talking about a the actual printers, distribution, marketing, marketing. Yeah, all of these things are just money, right and UH, now e books takes a lot of that and eliminates it. You don't have to worry about production costs as much. You have to worry about hosting, and you have to worry about bandwidth. Uh, marketing can be a lot more simple when you're using just electronic versions of marketing. You know, social networks things like email, Twitter or newsletters, that kind of stuff. Um, it has the potential to really kick publishing in the pants, which I think is another reason why we see the e book phenomenon taking longer than you would imagine it would take. Because I don't know that a lot of publishers are really eager to jump on that train. Just yet, there's still a little wary of where this is going to go. Sure, and for good reason. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there are plenty of good reasons from a business perspective to be a little nervous now, granted, if they can find a way to capitalize on that, to monetize it. Um. First of all, I don't think that physical books are ever going to go away. Uh. They just have to make sure that they are able to balance it out just right so that they produce enough physical books to meet that demand without overproducing and then operating at a loss. And also a way to monetize the electronic books so that it makes sense from a financial standpoint to offer both. Um. If they can find that, then you know they've hit the holy grail. Which is what's interesting is this doesn't apply just to to publishing. You could say that online distribution, I mean, that's going to be the future of delivering entertainment and information. It already is to a large extent here. But you're you're not just going to see this in the journalism and publishing. You're going to see it in television because and it's already happening in television and music, movies. All these things are are looking at online distribution as the next big thing, and it's either the next big scary thing or the next big this is awesome. We're all really filthy rich thing. I'm for the last one. I would uh yeah, I would not object to being filthy rich right now, you're just filthy. Yeah. I hear that. I hear that wealth is a burden, but it's one I'm willing to bear. All right, then, well, I guess we've pretty much covered this topic from from start to finish. I think cover to cover, cover to cover, nice good one. I think it's time to turn the page. That you were ahead, You were ahead, and now you're behind again. But if you want to learn more about e books, you can read lots of articles such as how the Amazon Kindle works. That's gonna be lie at how stuff works dot com and we'll talk to you again really soon. But more on this and thousands of other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you