It's clear to fans of e-books that there are obstacles to mainstream adoption. But the issues are not really show stoppers, so they don't seem to get a lot of attention from sellers. Nor from the publishers, who seem to hold all the cards, and who are moving relatively slowly because they want to retain as much power and revenues in the new e-book world as possible. They want to be careful in setting a new paradigm, because it will determine their future, and they are starting to realize that. However, like Palm, they seem to think that they also have all the time they need or want before they move forward with abandon.

So if all the complaints are "little ones", like the annoyances of DRM, then how is a publisher to get the point? Well, one forward thinking publisher has already got the point, he just hasn't applied it to e-books yet.

Michal Hyatt, President and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, has written in his blog about reducing "friction" as one way for bookstores to increase their sales. Specifically, he compares the pleasant and friction free retail experience of buying at an Apple store, with the friction experienced in a couple of bookstores he visited. He faced, long waits in line at two different stores, and in both cases he dropped the books after deciding that 1-click shopping on Amazon would be much easier. That's the effect of friction.

Now, compare it to e-books. There is a lot of friction...
1) DRM controls and platform dependence
2) Format confusion and incompatibility
3) Confusion about what reading devices are out there and how to compare them
4) Dependency on using a computer to order or load books
5) Format and feature support on the devices is unclear and confusing
6) The devices are as hard to use as a VCR - you know - the ones that often had blinking clocks that the user never figured out how to set.

I'm sure there is more, but you get the idea. No wonder everyone doesn't read e-books. It's not simply that people prefer paper, it's that paper is relatively "frictionless". All you have to put up with is the occasional long line at a bookstore. Just imagine if that was the only hassle for e-books.

Friction is a great term to describe a lot of situations and bring focus to customer adoption obstacles. It applies to smart phones and UMPCs very well also. UMPCs are underpowered and the tablet style is not really supported well enough to make it seamless and easy for the average computer user. Who knows, but maybe that will take a great on screen keyboard and voice control before the average user can be efficient with one.

Smart phones are difficult to use. You really have to want their functionality. They crash too often, they are slow, web sites load slowly or not at all, streaming video is a pain in the neck, even playing MP3s is not trivial. Don't get me wrong, they are getting better and I gladly use them warts and all. But they have a lot of friction.

But the case of e-books is a perfect example of high friction. Maintaining DRM seems a lot like choosing friction over sales. There may be a place for it, and there may be a style of DRM that's not so friction imposing, but right now it's almost a show stopper. You can paint DRM up with make up, but it's still going to look like a pig. A big fat friction pig!

I think some of the friction can be alleviated quite easily.
For instance if and when Amazon launch the Kindle, the friction of DRM will be reduced for them by the large user base and the 'oiling' of buy now and read now.
I mean will the average Joe have the same perception of the amount of friction caused by DRM that we tech savvy folk do?
I've had chats with none tech savvy ipod users and they were quite content with their purchases and didn't seem to be worried about DRM, The oiling of 'Being cool' 'cos i az a ipod was sufficient not to remove the friction but make it invisble to them.

Bob,
Excellent points about friction in the e-book process. I personally will admit that the issue of multiple e-book formats is one of the things that causes me friction in the e-book process... oh, this book is only available in LRF, but I don't have a Sony Reader... or oh, this book is only available for eReader, but I hate their DRM and don't want to be bothered...

On the other hand, there's friction, and there's friction. If Hyatt's biggest beef is that he had to wait in line for more than 2 minutes... he doesn't know what friction is! If he wants to take the trouble to go to 2 bookstores, find his books, walk away from both of them, buy through Amazon (paying higher shipping costs), and wait 2 days for the books... and he thinks it worked out better that way... then he's been living too long in the "Fast Food Nation," and he needs to get over his own impatience and chill in a line for a minute or five.

However, I will point out that there is friction in the traditional process besides standing in line. I frequently hear about a book, only to go looking for it, and find it already gone from the shelves. (Heck, he walked into the stores, and practically tripped over the books he wanted! No friction there!) This sometimes happens after my poring through high and low shelves, with my head painfully tilted 90 degrees to read the spines, then trying to use the store's clumsy computers to search a title (it amazes me every time I search for a title that I know exists, and a bookstore's computer cannot even identify it, much less find a copy).

Then, if I find a book, I get sticker-shock from being asked to pay $9 for a paperback. For me, there's serious friction there.

Because of this, I buy fewer printed books, and go to the bookstore less and less... traditional store friction keeps me from even walking in. This is essentially why websites like Amazon are doing so well: They get past most of that traditional store friction. (Word to Hyatt: Stay home next time.)

We've discussed e-book format standardization before, and I think that would go furthest to reducing e-book friction. Consistent and reasonable pricing are also big friction-cutters. However, there's no greater friction, or resistance, than from a wall directly blocking you... and the public's lack of knowledge about the existence of e-books represents the wall that needs to be broken down.

Personally, I think this takes us back to the iPod->iTunes->iTMS model, imperfectly emulated by Sony's Reader->ConnSOFT->ConnSTORE. Marketed and delivered as a package, that's about as frictionless as it gets.

Sadly, it promotes vendor lock-in. Keep in mind, I'm talking about the mass market here. That market requires a model that goes no further than "Plug this in here, Click that, and go read the book."

It's also completely dependent on the vendor moving quickly and smoothly with the content providers. That can be difficult. One idea would be if Sony found a way to incorporate sub-stores into ConnSTORE, in the same way that Amazon hosts entire sub-sites for some online retailers. Imagine being able to pull from the "Fictionwise" section on ConnSTORE, in Sony-friendly format. Click-click-zip, and you're reading on the Sony.

But how to replicate that for all the PDAs, smart phones, UMPCs, and other dedicated reader units? How do you make it that frictionless when one company doesn't have all three pieces under its control. You'd need a device-configurable iTunes-like program that could support multiple content providers. I'm not sure I see how the market can prod the development of something like that.

Have you looked at the current version of the MobiPocket desktop application? It's probably as close to what you describe as exists today. It allows you to buy from multiple stores, browse your "bookshelf", and seamlessly transfer content to any MobiPocket-supported device - UMPCs, PDAs, SmartPhones, iLiad, etc. - that you can connect to your PC. If you connect a device which doesn't have the MobiPocket Reader installed on it, it will even automatically install it on there for you if you wish. It's a very nice piece of software indeed.

No, I haven't, but I will now. I'm assuming it will also be a fairly easy connection when I switch to my shiny new NAEB reader sometime soon.

That's where standardized formats come in. To make it work, you only need 2 things:
1. The standardized format file; and
2. SW to convert the format to your reader.

Book content can therefore be simplified, and it's up to new readers/devices to write their own conversion SW. If the conversion SW in step 2 can be made as seamless as possible (or even invisible, built within your interface between the store and your device), you'll have frictionless content transfer.

I don't see why it's so important to have all the functionality in one program. Is it really that hard to use a browser to download books and whatever device dependent software you have to transfer the book to the reader? Compared with the amount of trouble that you have to take to buy a paper book, that is less than nothing.

No, the reason that ebooks aren't taking off is inertia. Buying ebooks is already easier than buying pbooks, warts and all. It's just that as ebook apologists we feel the process needs to be perfect before it will be adopted. It doesn't. It just needs to be better than buying pbooks, which it already is.

The only real problem with ebooks (at least legal ones) is lack of availability, and that is a function of inertia.

I'm certain it will. When I first plugged in my iLiad while it was running I was most surprised to see that it said "I see that you've just plugged in an iLiad. Would you like me to transfer all your new books onto it?" (or words to that effect). It's very "smart" and very user-friendly, too.

It may not be important for us, but it's vital if eBooks are to become "mass market" like, say, the iPod is. The beauty of the iPod compared with earlier MP3 players (of which there were lots) was the simplicity and transparency of the "iTunes" software. Just buy tunes from the store (or rip them from a CD), plug in your iPod, and your new music is automatically transferred to it. No complicated "computer stuff" involved.

I like the term 'friction,' and think it's appropriate.

The multiplicity of readers and formats is something that's not going to go away soon: so for the moment at least we're going to have to accept those factors and work around them. We will also have to wait for the industry to reach critical mass before the price of hardware starts to drop. So the important factor now is bringing the readership up so the hardware can get cheaper.

One big issue is price, ebooks are worth less to people than paperbacks and should be priced accordingly.

Another is the multiplicity of formats, forcing people to either buy multiple devices or install multiple reader programs in order to access their entire library.

A third is DRM. In many ways this is the biggest, and most harmful issue facing the industry today. Not only does it place obstacles in the way of reading the ebooks, but it also raises the price, and the spectre of the thought that the company can rewrite the license or go out of business taking your purchases with it. We've seen it happen with Google's paid video service, and with Mobipocket. Turn off the DRM server and you lose the ability to access what you've paid for. Without DRM you can keep a local archive copy and access it when and how you want.

Removing DRM will also help reduce the impact of multiple formats. There are multi-format readers out there, such as uBook, but they can't read the DRM'd formats. There are also various converters that will let you convert files from one format to another (provided it's unencrypted). It's easy to provide unencrypted books in a plethora of formats, just ask Arnold Bailey at Webscriptions or the people at Fictionwise. But you can't do that with DRM.

Get rid of DRM and the rest should follow.

To us, yes. But then, we aren't the mass market. Buying pbooks may involve a certain amount of hassle, but it's hassle the mass market understands. It's the same hassle they face with any other retail transaction. The very fact that AOL is still alive should be a good indicator of where the mass market is in technological aptitude.

But that's precisely my point. When you say that its hassle the mass market understands, all that means is that there hasn't been enough time for the mass market to get used to the hassle involved with using ebooks.

I really don't agree with you that DRM is the huge issue that some people make it out to be.

I turn again to iTunes as an example. iTunes has DRM for the overwhelming majority of its content, and it's been a massive commercial success. I don't know anyone who says "I'm not going to buy music from iTunes in case Apple goes out of business."

I know that one person here reported that they were unable to read a MobiPocket book that they'd bought while the MobiPocket server was down, but that's a bit of a mystery: I'm also a member of the "Fictionwise" Yahoo group and, while you couldn't buy new content from FW that depended on MP's DRM server, nobody there reported that they couldn't read what they already had. I don't know why that one person had a problem.

I really don't think that the average "man in the street" cares two hoots about DRM.

I think the "mass market" has had plenty of time to get used to the hassle... enough that they've had time to go to the stores and say "Stock some e-readers, please!" and call the publishers and say "Release my books in the formats I want!"

The fact that they haven't done these things is largely because the mass-market doesn't know e-books exist in the first place. And I also agree that, when they do find out about them, they don't want to have to go through the trouble of opening one web site to buy a book, open another piece of SW to convert the book, and open a third to get it into their reader. They want pathetic simplicity... the iTunes package. As hard as it might be for those of us in this forum to accept, it really does have to be that stoopid easy for everyone else.