The legend has it that a few years ago someone asked Steve Jobs if Apple is planning on entering the electronic book market and that Apple’s CEO allegedly stated that “since people don’t read anymore, there is no point”.

If the aforementioned tale has a grain of truth, for once (or twice) in his life Jobs might have been wrong. 

After a few initial stumbles, it seems like the electronic books market is finally taking off.  As of April 2009, Amazon sold 300,000 Kindle 2s, and a few days before this year’s Black Friday Barnes and Noble’s “nook” was sold out completely.  While reader devices’ sales figures have a long way to go before they catch up to iPod, at some point Mr. Jobs might regret his decision to stay away from electronic books.

When I purchased my first Sony PRS-505 eBook reader, my friends thought that I was slightly insane.  I had people come up to me on the bus, in coffee shops and in airports, asking me about the magic device that I was holding in my hands.  Now, while not quite as ubiquitous as their venerable paper siblings, electronic book readers are popping up all over the place. 

Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s line of eBook reader devices, and Barnes & Noble’s strangely named “nook” are a huge leap forward compared with the first few generations of clunky and barely usable devices.  However, are they really good enough to completely replace their paper brethren?

An average entry price into the wonderful world of electronic book readers is about $250.00 – a pretty big chunk of change.  If you think that it will pay for itself because you will stop buying paper books, you are in for a surprise.  On average (at least in my experience), you only save about 20% by purchasing an electronic copy vs. a paper book.  Let’s assume for the sake of argument that if you only read hardcover editions and save $5.00 to $7.00 on the cost of each book by buying the e-version, you would need to read 35 - 50 books before you break even.  Even taking into account that most people who buy these gadgets read a log, it might take you a good year or two to recoup your investment. 

Of course, two years from now eBook devices will not only allow you to read books, but will also boast videoconferencing, web-browsing, music-playing, TV-watching and butt-wiping capabilities, so you’d probably want to buy a new one anyway.

There are quite a few resources for free (public domain) books – Google books (http://books.google.com), Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org), or helpful sites such as Fried Beef’s Tech.  One way to get decent sneak-peaks at the new stuff is to sign up for Tor’s mailing list (www.tor.com).  Tor is a publishing company that often gives away free PDF manuscripts of their authors’ work.  Alas, if you are looking for the latest bestsellers by Dan Brown or Stephen King, you’ll have to shell out the dough. 

I’ve owned Sony’s PRS-505 for about 2 years now.  It is a great gadget, although in this day and age using a 2-year-old digital device is akin to driving a T-model Ford.  I use my eBook reader a lot, but I still buy quite a few paper books.  I love going to bookstores, browsing the shelves, touching the spines of books, inhaling the smell of paper and ink; downloading books from the web somehow takes away from that experience. 

What bothers me the most about the current eBook market is that the major players have not learned anything from the multiple DRM fiascos of the music industry.  I bought music from iTunes once and when I realized that there was a limit on how many devices I could play it, I refused to buy anything from iTunes until they started selling DRM-free MP3s. 

I have a fairly extensive collection of paper books, probably somewhere around 500 to 600 volumes.  Some of my books are well over a hundred years old, and I can still read them.  Would that be the case with any electronic book that I purchase today?  Probably not.   As a matter of fact, even in the short period of time that electronic eBooks have been commercially available, the industry went through at least a few dozens of file formats.   Over the years, I have accumulated quite a large eBook collection, but before I purchased any electronic book, I always made sure that I had access to some type of conversion software that would allow me to convert publisher’s proprietary format to plain text, or at least to the ubiquitous PDF. 

I love the idea of having a slim device that will hold hundreds of books.   I really hate the idea of buying books that my daughter might not be able to read 10 years from now.  I really wish that instead of staging device wars and investing millions of dollars in developing online stores, the burgeoning electronic book industry would take a look at the last 10 years of DRM struggles and lawsuits within the music industry and at least attempted not to repeat the same mistakes.