There is a wake-up call pending for ebook vendors and it goes something like this:
We, the people who buy your products, are tired of being treated like pork-flavored playing chips on the big money poker tables of corporate wolves for whom books are just commodities. We don’t want devices that only talk to your book store, we don’t want devices that can only display books in the formats you own and control, and we don’t want devices whose features assume that the book-reading experience has ended the moment our credit card has cleared your payment center.
Since it seems so difficult for you to understand how us book people think, here’s the rather simple list of freedoms and abilities we want:
- the freedom to read all ebook formats
- the freedom to buy books from any e-tailer
- the freedom to sync our entire collection between our reading devices and computers
- the ability to annotate our books
- the ability to rate and review the books we read, on the device
- the ability to create collections/albums of the books we own
- the ability to tag books with arbitrary keywords of our own choosing
- the ability to share our reviews, ratings, tags, etc with other readers and potential readers of those books, on any arbitrary device or web system
And lastly (and this is a big one, so pay attention):
- freedom from the threat that you or anyone else might at any time delete or alter the contents of our book collections, ever, for any reason, period, full stop
We realize that some of these features scare you. You believe that robbed of your ability to maintain a strangle-hold over every bit of book data that leaves your server, you might actually have to compete for our business. Well guess what? Sooner or later somebody is going to give us the ebook experience we want. And when they do, your days become sharply numbered. This isn’t a threat, it’s a simple fact of market economics. Get it right, or get out of our way.
And I’ll leave you with this one final warning: the Aldiko ereader app is already way ahead of you on this.
Love,
Your Customers
(Who also happen to be really eager to switch allegiance in a heartbeat if somebody is able to deliver these goods.)
For iOS, the non-free-but-excellent Marvin is my ereader of choice for anything that’s not from one of the locked-in stores.
(How does it stack up? Lemme check… Non-DRMed epub-only, I think; can create a small list of web-pages where you get books (e.g., Smashwords, Gutenberg, etc.); syncs via Dropbox, I think Calibre, and the usual ability to transfer files to/from an app when the iPad is plugged in; has a Notes and Highlighter ability; has an “organize” option I haven’t played with yet; allows tagging and other metadata manipulation; does not have rating per-se, but I think you can organize into multiple “groups” which could include ratings; don’t think it shares ratings…? Oh, look, you can share “books, highlights, & notes” with up to 5 friends via email.)
Also important to me is the ability to display a list of authors, so you can “drill down” via author name, rather than having to scroll through all the “author sorted” books. Stanza was the first iOS ereader that had true sort-by-author; Marvin has it, though I had to figure out which icon it was. (Not an inconvenient one, but not where I would’ve put that command.)
Thanks for the heads up on that, Elizabeth. Apple platforms are the ones I’m least familiar with.