10 reasons why ebooks suck

Posted by Ben on December 30, 2009 | Permalink | Hits: 685 
Tags: ebook, comments, editing, navigation, theme, design, information overload, distractions, attention span, duplication, search engines, pdf readers

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Apparently, portable readers are on the rise. These allow you to buy digital books and read them on the move. I guess you could read ebooks on these readers, too. While there may be some benefits to reading ebooks offline, there are numerous issues with reading them on your computer when you could just read the content on a blog. Here are 10 reasons why I think ebooks suck, big time.

1. You can't comment.

One of the best things about blogging is being able to interact with your audience. Write a new post, publish it, and some of your readers may add their views. This can't be done with an ebook. Not all topics need to be commented on, though. I wouldn't bother with an ebook if you're hoping to get feedback on each chapter. You might get some limited feedback on the ebook as a whole, perhaps via email, but it's a lot easier to comment on a blog post than to comment on an ebook.

2. Editing is a pain.

If you write a post today, some of it might need to be updated in the future to keep it current. Making changes to a blog post is easy - just click the Edit link, modify it as needed, and publish the updated version. Changing an ebook is a pain, though. First, you have to go back to the original document, and make your changes there. Next, you need to save it as a PDF. Finally, you need to put the file online. This may not seem like a difficult process, but it's incredibly laborious if you have to go through it over and over again.

3. Old copies may still be out there.

With a blog post, the latest version is always on your site. I guess it's possible for readers to save a copy offline, or they might be viewing an earlier version in their feed reader. But I think an ebook is much more likely to be downloaded than a blog post is, so this becomes a bigger problem with ebooks than with blogs. How often will you update your ebook? Maybe not that often, but if you do have to make some changes or you want to write a second edition, you'll struggle to get all of the original readers to come back and download the latest version. Then again, if they do come back and download it again, your stats will include this "double dip" behaviour and it'll seem as though you've had far more downloads than you actually have. Bravo! Or not.

4. PDFs are horrible to navigate.

I once read that the PDF file format was designed to provide an accurate representation of how a document would look when printed. It's far more reliable to print a PDF than, say, saving a document in Microsoft Word but then printing it from Open Office. So, PDFs are great for printing. But that's the whole point. While they do provide ways to navigate the document, I've always found it incredibly painful to browse a large document on my computer than to flick through the pages of a book by hand, or move around a blog. Of course, it's still possible to run a blog that's tough to navigate, especially if you rely on date-based navigation (here's why you should organise your blog in a logical, coherent manner). However, blogs generally give you far greater control over the navigation than PDF does.

5. Information overload.

Admittedly, I'm not much of a reader - at least not when it comes to books. I do read blogs, news sites, Wikipedia and other online material, but I steer clear of books. I much prefer being able to read one or two posts on a blog without feeling the need to read the entire history of that blog before I have some idea of what the blogger's writing about. Sometimes, you do need to go back a few posts to catch up on the history - I vividly remember a blog that went on and on about a monumental event in the author's life, for months and months of posts, and I just couldn't figure out what they were doing, or why! Still, I can usually get the gist of a blog post even if my first visit to the blog is after 50 posts have been written. With an ebook, I have to set time aside to read the whole damn thing. And to be perfectly frank, most of the ebooks I've seen just aren't good enough to justify that amount of time.

6. Too much duplication.

Sure, blogging has plenty of posts that overlap so much, you could probably remove a chunk of other posts and just say it all in one post. I've always felt that ebooks are far worse, though. I've considered the idea of publishing an ebook for Top Ten Blog Tips. Here's how it would go: I'd compile some of the best posts from the site with a few new posts that would probably end up on the site anyway. This might be good for new readers, but long-term readers would get all of the same information, all over again. If I wrote a second or a third ebook, you'd then end up with content that overlapped with the first ebook as well as the site itself. It's like a Greatest Hits compilation - nice for the casual reader, but ultimately it's a marketing ploy where you compile a lot of old stuff in a new package that couldn't possibly be popular. Could it? Oh wait - Greatest Hits compilations seem to go down rather well, don't they? Well, blah! I'm a completist - I'd much rather publish new posts on the blog than cobble together a bunch of unrelated posts into a silly file format with a silly front cover and a silly introduction from me, the author. Then again, maybe it would be popular...

7. Inconsistent design.

Sure, you can include images and styles in your PDF, but you'll be hard pushed to replicate anything but the simplest blog design within the file itself. I guess it's a different medium, so the style rules are different. But I'd much prefer to have a relatively consistent look and feel for all of the products associated with my blog. It looks more professional, and it helps to establish your brand identity. If I were to release a new ebook every week with a totally different look and feel for each one, you may well recognise my name, but would it get new readers to my blog? Or would it just get new readers for the ebook? Hmm, I suppose I could market myself as ME, rather than as Top Ten Blog Tips, which is actually how I do things over at benbarden.com. I'm starting to remember why that blog has started to do a bit better than this one... hmm... anyway, moving on...

8. Who downloads but doesn't read?

If 100 people download your ebook but only 25 actually read it, what can you conclude from that? It may not be a reflection on the quality of your writing, but it shows that the entry barrier is quite a bit higher with ebooks than with a blog. You can counter this by using a killer title for your ebook, and publish some sample content on your site, but some people simply won't download it because it's too much effort to do so. Now that may sound silly, and it probably is, but you have to grab the attention of your readers or they won't stick around. Hiding your best content in an ebook may not be the most sensible choice. On the other hand, if you only put your worst content in an ebook, then that's not good either! How do you keep things balanced?

9. Search engine difficulties.

Amongst other types of file, Google includes PDF documents in its search results. I don't know about you, but if I see a PDF in the results, I'll almost always skip it. It's faster and easier to read a web page than to read a PDF. Well, unless the web page is plastered with ads and widgets, then it's a different story! Another issue I've found with finding a PDF in Google is that clicking the link may not always take you to the relevant page in the document - you'll end up on the first page. It's for this reason that I usually avoid PDF documents if I can help it.

10. PDF readers just aren't that great.

The humble web browser is incredibly simple to use. It has plenty of handy settings such as bookmarks, tabbed browsing, and a Google search box. PDF documents sometimes open in your browser, but in a clunky plugin that seems to slow everything down. Either that, or it opens a separate reader that is such a disaster, it sometimes makes me close the reader as soon as I realise I just opened a PDF (it's not always clear until you actually click on a link!). Then we get the infamous "upgrade" dialog along with massive downloads for what should be a very simple piece of software. I think things have improved since I last used Windows (I moved to Ubuntu earlier this year), but Adobe Reader is one of my least favourite software packages of all time. It completely ruins the PDF "experience" for me and was one of the underlying reasons for writing this post. But once I thought about it some more, I found plenty of reasons why PDFs - and ebooks in general - suck. To be fair, it's more the technology that's the problem than the actual ebook itself, but the issues are so serious that I usually link the two together.

So - that's how I feel about ebooks. You may have noticed I have not completely ruled out ebooks as an option though, as I did come up with a few benefits as I wrote this post. Overall though, I hate them with a passion. If I produce a PDF someday, it's not because I think PDFs are great, it's because I think people might actually read it. I generally don't read them.

What do you think?

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Comments on 10 reasons why ebooks suck

6

Ben | January 13, 2010 | 190 comments

Thanks for the comments everyone. I may do a follow-up post to show the other side of the coin, as I've been considering writing an ebook in the future. It may help to distil some of my content into a portable format. That's all I'm saying for now :)

8

Ben | March 07, 2010 | 190 comments

ProBlogger and John Chow have huge blogs though. Somehow I don't think I could sell 19,000 copies of an ebook. Then again, you never know until you try. I'd probably give an ebook away for free.