The Free Beer post below made me think of the whole eBook thing again.

I currently receive a number of magazine subscriptions in electronic format, and I love it. It takes bloody ages for hardcopy magazines to make it all the way to Australia, and I have no problem at all reading PDF versions of magazines on flights, etc. Worst case, I can print out the specific articles and read them in the proverbial.

So why are eBooks so unsatisfying, when magazines in this format rock?

Part of it for me comes back to updates. Magazines are almost meant to be transient (although don’t mention the boxes of Delphi Magazine, DDJ, etc back issues I have in my garage), but books are supposed to be longer lived. As far as I can tell, most eBooks don’t come with updates. The Indy book is one exception, but I wish more eBook publishers would treat them like software. Give me minor updates for free, and charge me (a reduced amount) for major upgrades, or let me subscribe so I get everything for a year.

eBooks give publishers the cost model of software, but they don’t seem very keen to pass on the other benefits to end users.