I love reading. I read a lot. I read every night before bed. I probably read 20-30 books a year.

I love books. I love the smell of a new book. I love being the first one to read the physical copy of a book. I like being the person who cracks the spine.

So I’ve mostly dismissed e-readers. The Kindle looks interesting and the linking with the Amazon book is a smart feature and I did muse about the value of buying one. But it wasn’t available in the UK and then the iPad was announced ….

So I started wondering could I read books really on an electronic device? Could I give up all those things I like about books. The quality of CDs is way higher than MP3s but I pretty much listen exclusivity to MP3s now. My CD play isn’t even connected to my amp anymore. Convenience beat out the smallish loss of quality and that was that for music requiring actual media. And it was the iPod and iTunes where that convenience came in. I remember the days of loading songs on my 512 MB iRiver for the gym. I still listened to CDs in those days.

So I know if something becomes easier to use you soon forget about the reasons for not shifting. You just shift your behaviour without realising it.

But books are different right?

Well I thought I would try an experiment. I would read a book on my iPhone and if that was ok, I would consider buying the iPad. I’ve seen several comments on the web about people reading books on the iPhone’s and that the experience wasn’t that bad.

Roughly around this time @Reynolds wrote a interesting piece on the Amazon vs MacMillan spat, where he linked to his two books, in digital format for free. So I made a deal with myself. I would download and Blood, Sweat and Tea (and the sequel) and if I liked them I would buy the books and give them away to friends. I’ve met Tom at a blog meet two years ago, and follow him on Twitter, and he’s a nice bloke, so if I liked the books, I felt I owed him at least the cover price. Although sending him a tenner would net him more cash, most authors would rather be read.

I did enjoy the books. Immensely. They are really fascinating, well written and human. I highly recommend them. I bought two copies of Blood, Sweat & Tea off Amazon and gave them to my friends Ross and Andrew. With a deal. When done they to pass them onto someone else. Hopefully by spreading the book around ,Tom will get more people recommending it, and more sales in the end.

So what was it like reading a book on my iPhone?

Surprisingly after about 5 pages I forgot about the fact I was reading it on my iPhone and was just reading. I used the excellent Stanza App which made it really easy, and even with no iBookStore or KindleStore it was all pretty simple to get set up. I actually found the "tap to page turn" mechanism much easier than reading a paper book. Also reading in the dark while other people are trying to sleep in the same room an unexpected benefit. I also tend to flip from side to side with big books as I read on my side, and one half of a book is normally heavier than the other. With an iPhone this wasn’t an issue.

So what was a problem?

Well the formatting was off. I’m not sure if this was the ePub format or something else but having glanced through the properly formatted printed edition this was definitely a loss. The other issue was the amount of text easily visible on an iPhone is a bit less than on a normal printed page. However this I expect to not be an issue on an iPad or Kindle.

The "digital" aspect vs paper was never noticed once. In face some unexpected easy ways to bookmark pages, look things up in a dictionary and cut and paste text all where great additions that easily outweighed it not being paper.

I unrelatedly played with a Sony eBook reader in Waterstones yesterday. The flash black/white when turning a page would drive me super batty (I think). Looks like the Kindle has this effect too, so I’m way more likely to get something like an iPad than an Kindle. Of course I would need to play with an iPad first to know if it’s worth getting but based on my iPhone experience there’s a higher chance of it now.

I’ll probably blog more on eBooks at some other time, but for them to take off I really think they need to learn the lessons the music and film industry seem to have failed to make. Including

• No DRM. Seriously, All it does is annoy paying customers.
• Formatting. Seriously how hard can it be to format something that has to start digitally to begin with.
• Easy easy easy easy. Make it easy to buy. Easy to load. Easy to read.
• Available everywhere. On your own store. On Amazon. On iTunes. Don’t make me need 4 apps depending on where I buy a title from.
• Make it cheaper. Don’t knock $3 off the cover price and bemoan the cannibalisation of hard covers. I also can’t resell or lend an ebook, and you also don’t have to chop a whole fucking tree down and truck it around.

Sadly so far, the book/publishing industry seems content to make the same mistakes all the other media industries have made.

The best way to beat piracy is with connivence. Well that and a decent price. Man up and be innovative for a change.