Marketers, buck up!
But publishers say they have "no other choice." Hogwash! It's the same chicken-and-egg issue of over-protected copyright that has stopped so many other potential great technologies from ever taking off quickly worldwide. In their profiteering little minds, development costs and royalties must all be passed down to consumers, however unpalatable the final pricing structures will be. To anyone with eyes to see, the US may be more tolerant of such capitalistic mediocrity, but Asia is the wrong target for these strategies.
Buck up, e-book marketers
So the real problem with e-book technology lies in the over-protective, over-profiteering way it is being marketed.
E-books are padlocked with security software, and designed (for commercial gain more than anything else) to be read mainly on dedicated e-book devices that cost at least US$200 to own. These readers are basically useless for any other purpose, unlike PDAs and notebooks. The readers are also cumbersome to use and peruse from, available only for English, and basically take all the fun out of reading. And, even sharing the file with your friends is not always possible.
Also, not everyone likes reading for extended periods, off a small LCD screen. Not for work, and definitely not for pleasure. Scrolling and flipping through pages just isn't the same on any computer, screen size notwithstanding.
People just aren't warming up to these "drawbacks", which are overwhelming the advantages of having books in electronic form.
So until publishers pull out all the stops on opening up the technology for accessing e-books and let low-priced e-documents be easily accessed from computing devices that people already own, they should not expect any support from buyers at large--Asian or otherwise.
