At first, I was intrigued by the Amazon announcement of their new e-book reader Kindle. Then I didn’t follow much of the coverage since I don’t live in the U.S. and knew I wouldn’t have access to this new gadget. But Joe Wikert’s question, “How do you feel about paying $9.99 for an ebook?” made me think about Kindle a little more.

The price of books

Here in Buenos Aires English-language books are hard to come by. There are two bookstores in this very large city that specializes in English books, neither is anything near a Border’s in collection size (far from it, actually). Of the two bookstores I almost always go to the one that sells used books, partly because they have a very good literary selection. At the used bookstore in Buenos Aires I usually pay around $25- $35 pesos for a book. That’s about $7.94 - $11.11 given current exchange rates.

Given the limitations of buying books in English I would gladly pay $9.99 for an e-book. Indeed, I would be thrilled for the ability to purchase a wide variety of books that could be placed on a portable e-book reader at that price.

Reading digitally

Before moving to Buenos Aires I rarely read anything on the screen, almost always printing out everything I downloaded. Now, I tend not to print very much and over the last few years have gotten very used to reading on a screen. Having made that hurdle, I’m just waiting for a quality e-book reader to come along. Perhaps Kindle is it. I think it is getting very close and surely it’s just a matter of time before e-book readers become as common as portable audio players.

International use of the Kindle e-book reader

International use is where an e-book reader becomes a necessity. And I’m not talking about Canada, Australia, or the UK but places where books in English are not so easy to come across.

So, I thought, hmmm, maybe I should really consider getting a Kindle even with its current flaws. But the wireless device only works in the U.S. You can’t use the wireless downloads outside the U.S. I can live without wireless downloads if content could be transferred via USB from a PC. From reviewing the Amazon forums on Kindle, this question of international usage has come up a few times. Currently, Kindle only functions on the Sprint EVDO data network, which cuts out most of the world.

Yet, I’m certain these data access issues will become less restrictive in future versions of Kindle or with whatever new e-book device is next to appear. So, I keep waiting for that e-book reader, which for me down here at the end of the world, is a necessity.

And a word about product design

Obviously, I’ve not seen Kindle in person but the photo of Kindle makes it look like a cheap, plastic toy made for children ages 5 - 8. That becomes especially obvious when I pulled up the Amazon home page last night that displayed Kindle just above the Nintendo DS, which looks lovely.

If you travel a lot then you know the problem of carrying around guidebooks: they can be large and you often don’t use half the chapters in the book. A travel guide friend of mine actually recommends ripping out the pages that you don’t want from a guidebook in order to make it lighter, easier to carry around.

Lonely Planet is introducing downloadable chapters of its guidebooks. The price of each chapter varies but it seems to be around $2.50 or so. It reminds me of the TravelFish guides to southeast Asia that we wrote about last month.

So far, Lonely Planet only has chapters from its Latin American guidebooks available for download. This concept is particularly good for travelers on the road. In many countries it’s very difficult to find English-language travel books.

Yesterday we talked about some of the problems with the current generation of e-books. And by e-book we’re not talking about the types that require a proprietary hardware reader. We mean just digital files (usually PDF) that can be purchased online.

Travelfish is a company that specializes in producing downloadable guidebooks (eGuides) to travel spots in Southeast Asia. Each guide is available in PDF and costs around $2.95 - $3.95. For each eGuide book Travelfish tells the prospective buyer exactly how many pages and maps are included as well as other relevant information to help make your purchase decision.

And one of the things I like the best is that Travelfish provides screen snapshots of the interior layout of the eGuides.

That tells potential buyers that Travelfish isn’t trying to hide anything, isn’t attempting to rip someone off with a crappy e-book. Travelfish just put a little effort into making what appears to be a quality product.

I also like the low pricing of the Travelfish guides. I see a lot of e-books that charge the same as a printed hardcover volume. I think that a smaller page count along with a smaller price creates a better e-book product. Most books, even in print, don’t need to be 300 pages and an e-book certainly doesn’t need to be that long. Also, the low pricing should make the purchase an impulse buy for many people.

We think that Travelfish has a good model for the ways that e-books should be developed and marketed.

We’ve noticed that there’s a lot of demand for designing e-book covers. And as with all books there is quite a range of quality among the books. Many, if not most, e-books are not very well written. But maybe that’s also true with printed books if one counts all the self-published titles in existence. (There are some very good self-published books, but I think everyone knows that there are also a lot of bad books, too). Some of the e-books we’ve seen are nothing more than Word document files of less than ten pages.

And some e-books are just outright scams. There seems to be a lot of that floating around on the net. And, yes, you can waste money on printed books, too, but at least with print you can see what you buying in the bookstore before purchasing the thing. Most Web sites selling e-books don’t provide previews of any inside pages or even tell you the number of pages.

This brings us to the trend in designing e-book covers where an image is created to make the e-book resemble a printed book, appearing three dimensional with a spine.

We’ve done this ourselves for clients when requested. Here’s an e-book cover and Web page that we’ve designed:

This isn’t a post to promote that particular e-book, which is why we’re not linking to that particular Web site. We just wanted to address this trend in designing e-book covers. Since we believe in design, we believe all books deserve a good design. There’s an interesting philosophical question as to whether design should be used to promote certain activities but we’ll leave that discussion to the pundits.

But we would like to call for e-book authors not to request an e-book cover that resembles a printed book. You don’t need that. If you want that, then we’ll design it for you but think about why you feel the need for it. What you need, as with any cover, is a compelling design. Indeed, with an e-book you also need a very well designed Web page. Far too many e-books are promoted from poorly designed Web sites.

Also, we would like to see more e-book authors pay attention to the layout and formatting of their interior pages. There is a lot that can be done in PDF. And e-book authors should also provide a preview of a few pages to prospective buyers. With just a little more work, by making a quality product, a quality e-book, you surely can sell more than if you just go for the quick buck from the unsuspecting, naive consumer. Let’s see more quality from e-books.