Apple's iPod has been around since October, 2001, and has gone on, in its various forms, to become the most popular and successful digital music player ever. It seems obvious that any company that could do for other media what the iPod did for music would have customers beating a path to its door; which is probably why Apple is trying to repeat its music-based triumph by moving into television and movies. Sony, on the other hand, is having a go at literature. If their scheme pans out, we will have this non-intuitive result: the first successful e-reader will be five years younger than its musical counterpart. Surely there's a reason for this. Why is there no iPod for books?

There are two major issues that any ebook system will have to deal with. The first is the Conversion Problem, and the second is the Output Problem.

The Conversion Problem

The crux of this issue involves a concept outlined in Nicholas Negroponte's book, Being Digital: It's about Bits and Atoms. Old school technologists and geeks are familiar with this idea already, but, here's an explanation nonetheless.

"Atoms," in this context refer to physical objects; things like tables, lamps, cats--any corporeal thing. "Bits," on the other hand refers to data or information. For our purposes a book that is made out of paper and ink and glue, is an Atom. The story that the book tells, if it were extracted from the page and placed in a digital format (like a Word document), would become "Bits."

For some products the conversion is easy. Take music, for example. At first music was recorded and distributed as Atoms--that is, records. Wax cylinders gave way to vinyl disks, which co-existed with various magnetic tape formats; still Atoms. The information on these formats was encoded using analog methods. If you wanted to copy them you had to have some expensive, specialized equipment, and that equipment wasn't good for anything but making those copies. It wasn't even practical for the average consumer to acquire this stuff until the early eighties.

But, following a strategy that they would later come to regret, the music industry began to shove a new, digital audio format down our throats. Recording companies undertook to convert all of their old audio tapes to digital data, hoping to make a little more money off the same old crap; it was a massive effort, underwritten by the hypothetical future profits that would result from consumers trying to update their music libraries. That conversion process, once general purpose computers with CD-ROM drives became popular and allowed us to take advantage of music's new digital nature, led eventually to iTunes and the iPod.

Books, on the other hand, are analog from the ankles up. Music fans benefited from the fact that for years they could buy a CD, bring it home, and in a few minutes have flawless copy on their hard drives to do with as they pleased. Try doing that with a book. Oh sure, you could scan all of the pages and run them through an OCR program, but how long would that take? If you had a fancy, sheet fed, high-volume scanner the process wouldn't take as long, but you'd have to practically destroy the book you bought.

So, the first ingredient here is an easier way to convert the book's Atoms to Bits. Sony is addressing this need by selling books on their Connect site, a web-based, iTunes-like store for ebooks. They'll do the conversion for you. But, one of the great things for the iPod in its early days was the ability for consumers to fill it with music that they already owned on CD. There is still no easy way to convert your existing library to digital without having to re-buy everything. (Unless you're into public domain books.)

The Output Problem

Then what? You've got the book in your computer, but how are you going to read it? On your computer screen? Reading short articles on the web is one thing, but a whole book can be tough on the eyes. What's more, you'd lose one of the best features that ink-and-paper books possess: their portability. You could print it out, as many copies as you like, but unless you're in the business of book piracy, you only need one hardcopy; you could have just used the book you've already purchased.

What you need is an electronic device that is almost as convenient as the original book, preferably something that can hold lots of books. Sony hopes their new ebook reader will address that problem. Some pretty important technological advances have gone into improving the ebook reading experience, but only time will tell if it's going to be a success.

Conclusions

If we assume that the Sony e-reader has what it takes to do well on the output side of the equation, then the overall success of the venture will rest on their resolution to the Conversion Problem. The X factor here is whether or not people are looking for a novel way to buy new books, while leaving their existing libraries on the shelf. That is, the average consumer may not care about being able to read the books they already own in an electronic format; they may just want the convenience of immediate content delivery.

What matters is whether or not Sony's delivery method can hold up. Since it is impractical for users to input their own books on the e-reader, their Connect site will become relatively more important than iTunes is to the iPod. But, Sony's store can deal with the inevitable back-end haggling between the various publishing companies, if they can deliver the goods reliably to the consumer, and if they can do it at a reasonable price, then there's a chance that this venture could fundamentally change the world of books, with all the obvious ramifications that such a change would cause.