Technology To Lower The Cost Of Books

Being an tech enthusiast, I had been thinking about starting up a technology blog for some time now. While there are already a number of blogs on technology out there, I wanted some space to put up my ideas on how I feel technology can be used in a better way to improve lives. Anyway, here's my first attempt.

Two things that I enjoy doing the most are watching movies and reading books in that order. Of course, I am a man of varied interests, and I enjoy doing a lot more, but I'm going to focus on movies and books in this particular post.

I've seen technology changing the way movies have been watched and books have been read over the past decade or so. For movies, I moved from video cassettes, to CDs, to DVDs, to movies stored in Hard Disks that I can play on my PS3, to movies being rented over Netflix. The last part I haven't really experienced yet since Netflix hasn't launched its services in Singapore. I'm also not counting YouTube here since I haven't had a great movie watching experience yet on it.

On the other hand, for books, I have seen technology moving at a slower pace. I have personally moved away from buying paper books, and I do all my reading on my iPad. However, in many cases, I see that the cost of e-books is higher, and even the options I get on Kindle or iBooks (iBooks isn't even launched for Singapore) are not as expensive as I'd get in a brick and mortar store. There's a lot the e-book industry needs to work on to reach a level comparable to the movie industry.

Here's my perspective on what a book distribution company can think of working on. Just the way we have libraries of movies available through Netflix, where users can rent movies, I'd really like to see someone coming up with a library of e-books. e-Books can potentially be rented at 1/10th of the price, and the e-book is available on the device for a week or so. This way, royalty prices can be saved, and there can be a re-distribution model built out for e-books.

Anyway, those were my two cents on how the future may look like for the e-book industry. I shall come back next week with more ideas and more (possible) technology innovations.