We need broadband connectivity with ebooks

The focus on sales of eBook readers is misleading, because the first challenge is to change the book itself, so that it delivers far more value than the paper edition with which we are familiar.

Kindle sales, which is estimated are approximately 160,000 units as of this writing, are a great indication that people do want an alternative to hauling a pile of books or to reading on a PC. BeBooks has sold 30,000 of its reader devices—people want this option.
However, we are at precisely the same stage in the digital book reader device market as when Audible saw the first challengers to its portable digital audio player emerge, in 1998. Music had not changed—that is, it hadn’t been unbundled from the concept of an “album”—and did not change until the iPod appeared.

Amazon’s Kindle, which I have used extensively, remains the most impressive device based on price and functionality, in my opinion. The Sony Reader needs broadband connectivity and substantially improved navigation and note-taking ability in order to keep up with Kindle. The iRex Reader 2nd Edition, a $699 Linux-based reader with Wacom pen technology, is really impressive, but way to expensive to be a viable competitor in a world where readers of this blog want a device that is $99 or less. New flexible display technology from Plastic Logic promises good things, too, however the main problem remains not how to display text, rather it is how to link different versions of the same text together for use across devices, because what we call “books” today are now available in many different contexts and interfaces. (from Mitch Ratcliffe

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Kindle's euphoria

Initial skepticism about Amazon's Kindle is being replaced by euphoria:

Citi's Mark Mahaney, who was already bullish on the e-book reader, declares that is indeed going to be Amazon's iPod.

In practical terms, that means that Mahaney has gone back and revisited his original estimates from this spring. He now thinks Amazon (AMZN) will sell 378,000 units this year, double his initial guess. And he thinks instead of being a $750 million business that accounts for 3% of the company's sales next year, the Kindle will be a $1.1 billion business that accounts for 4%.
What's changed? No specific data, Mahaney says, because getting real numbers out of Amazon is impossible, and the supply chain is pretty tightly wrapped, as well.

But he's seen lots of little data points: Better reviews of the device on Amazon, the fact that it remains on top of Amazon's best-seller list, etc. And he's also swayed by TechCrunch's recent report pegging sales of the device so far at 240,000. Take note, J-school seminars -- the following comes from a well-regarded Wall Street analyst:

We acknowledge being “out-sourced” by TechCrunch. But we believe the 240K number was well-sourced and believe reports of 40,000 shipments a month may also be reasonable.

Ereading compared to music sector

Ian Hudson, president of the Publishers Association and deputy chief executive of the Random House Group, believes while Ebooks reader presents a great opportunity, he did not feel ereading is yet capable of doing for books what the iPod did for music.

He said: "In my view this is the best piece of equipment out there. But research has found that people have a high emotional attachment to physical books... so the industry is likely to be slower to change than the music sector."

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Textbooks via Ebooks for universities

With the announcement that universities in the US are looking to distribute textbooks via e-books rather than the tower of paper we were all used to, is it time for the e-book to make its way into the mainstream?

But who are the runners and riders, what does the future hold, and it is the end of the paperback as we know it? Let's quickly look at what an e-book is before we go on to see which e-books are leading the pack in the market. All the devices here use a technology called E Ink. E Ink is a type of electronic paper manufactured by E Ink Corporation.

Basically electronic ink displays are made up of millions of tiny microcapsules, about the diameter of a human hair. Each microcapsule contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a negative electric field is applied, the white particles move to the top of the microcapsule to become visible to the reader. This makes the surface appear white at that spot.

At the same time, an opposite electric field pulls the black particles to the bottom of the microcapsules where they are hidden. By reversing this process, the black particles appear at the top of the capsule, which now makes the surface appear dark at that spot. To form an E Ink electronic display, the ink is printed onto a sheet of plastic film that is laminated to a layer of circuitry. The circuitry forms a pattern of pixels that can then be controlled by a display driver. This in the real world means a number of things, but most importantly that you don't get the glare normally associated with LCD displays, and additionally battery power is only needed to change the microcapsules on the display you can achieve greater battery efficiency.

So what are the players (or should I say readers) in the market?

The Sony Reader Digital Book .

The iRex iLiad reader

The Bookeen Cybook Gen3

The Kindle

The Readius

The HP e-book reader

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

F-Origin, which closed a $5 million third round of capital a few months ago, sees eBook readers such as Amazon’s Kindle as a natural market for its touchscreen technology, which provides tactile user feedback.

But the company already has orders from a mobile phone company, a firm making touchscreen picture frames, and a point-of-service kiosk product maker. CEO Joe Carsanaro is a serial entrepreneur who previously founded venture-backed Bloodhound Software. “I started Bloodhound in my closet in France,” Carsanaro tells TechJournal South. “I got it going and on my first trip back to the United States I came to give a pitch at a venture conference, and got two term sheets.” RTP-based Bloodhound sells software for claims overpayment protection services for health care payers. F-Origin evolved from another of Carsanaro’s previous gigs. As general manager of a Motorola phone business, he was asked to start a group to develop innovative products in the messaging space. A company that wanted to sell its touchscreen phones to Motorola approached the new group. “I didn’t like the phone per se, but liked the technology,” Carsanaro says. When the company failed, he joined several other investors to buy its software and licensing rights to its patents. They include patents on motion (gesture) control of devices, haptics (touch feedback) and innovative touchscreens. The 10-employee company wants a chunk of the estimated $2.6 billion touchscreen market.

Carsanaro says F-Origin’s HaptiTouch products not only provide pressure-sensing touch feedback, they also have good light and low power consumption, he says. “They have the ability to drive the user interface via a finger, a stylus, or a pen,” he says. That means that medical professionals could use a device equipped with the technology while wearing gloves. Its touchpads can be programmed to provide different responses depending on touch force, and the touch sensitive area can be any shape. HaptiTouch supports devices of all kinds, and displays ranging from small mobile phones to screens as large as 15 inches. Its customizable API can be implemented with multiple operating systems. In a previous interview, Carsanaro noted that while portable devices are becoming very sophisticated, that means users have to navigate a bewildering plethora of multi-function buttons. “The result is function fatigue syndrome,” he says.

The company introduced its first product in the third quarter of 2007 and expects to ramp up sales in the third and fourth quarters this year. Carsanaro says the company will likely increase its staff up to 15 to 17 in a year.

On the Web: http://www.f-origin.com/

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Dual Display

It's no surprise that more displays is always better, but when it comes to mimicking the act of reading a book, dual displays is a clear step forward. Researchers at Maryland and Berkeley Universities developed a prototype dual-face, modular e-book reader that allows readers to fan pages to advance in a book or via trackball. If you're doing some serious research, the displays separate from one another, allowing one to display in landscape mode while the other runs in portrait. To complete the book meme, the device can be folded over to run in a more compact manner, and a simple flip changes the page. Possibilities for future e-book readers are endless here, so we applaud Maryland and Berkeley for using those research dollars.

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Endless ideas and Bebook

The latest ebook reader to market is called the BeBook and it prices around $400.

The BeBook is produced by a company named Endless Ideas. The device sports a six-inch screen and makes use of special E-ink technology so you can read on-screen contents in bright daylight. The BeBook has an internal rechargeable battery which lets you get an estimated 7,000 page turns of an on-screen book, which is plenty for most travels.

Other features of the BeBook include internal memory for book storage which can be increased via SD memory cards, support for a variety of related digital document formats such as .doc and .pdf, and USB connectivity. It should be available for purchase now.

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Grammatisation by Bernard Stiegler

Now a few years into this 21st century, which will be the century of nanotechnologies and which will see unheard of relations between technics, science and desire, the crucial question of what links and distinguishes power, knowledge and the will, i.e., the question of what can, at times, set these infinitives into oppositions, composing them at the same time, by posing them together, this question which, more profoundly and par excellence is the problem of thought and its ass’s skin – as though it diagrammed the mechanism of that stupidity Deleuze called “transcendental” --, this question is a problem for us, so much so as to appear to have become unthinkable, the test and ordeal of powerlessness itself.

The great transformation of these terms, in as much as they are constituted only through the relation they form, begins with the advent of machines as a stage in the process of grammatisation. I call “grammatisation” the process whereby the flux and flow networking our existences become discreet elements: writing is thus, as the breaking into discreetelements of the flux of speech (let us invent the word “discretisation” for this possibility), a stage in grammatisation. Now, the process of grammatisation, with the dawn of the industrial revolution, suddenly surpasses the sphere of language – one wants to say that the same thinghappened to the sphere of logos – and invades the sphere of the body: first and foremost, the gestures of workers, which are discredited, devalued in view of their automatic reproduction –while at the same time the machines and apparat uses of reproducibilities of the visible and the audible appear on the scene.

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Books as efficent machines

The ebook market remains small, but Amazon's electronic reader has renewed interest in book downloads guardian.co.uk

More than four months after Amazon.com released the Kindle, publishers believe that it has helped, if not revolutionised, the tiny market for electronic books.
Amazon.com has received extensive media coverage since unveiling the Kindle last November, when the first run sold out within a few hours. It has declined to give sales figures for the Kindle - at least 2,000, judging from the number of customer reviews - but has said repeatedly that supply is not keeping up with demand, with the device often out of stock.

Publishing officials are reluctant to discuss sales figures, but say that they have seen double digit increases in ebook sales since the Kindle's release, and renewed interest in downloads for the Sony Reader. Sales for the most popular ebooks are in the hundreds, comparable to the number for the Reader, which came out in 2006.

"The Kindle has increased awareness. Publishers have told me that in some cases the Sony numbers were double or triple what they had been," says Michael Smith, head of the International Digital Publishing Forum, which tracks ebook sales.
Selling through Amazon.com for $399 (£199), the Kindle is thinner than most paperbacks and weighs 0.29 kg. It can hold some 200 books, along with newspapers, magazines and an entire dictionary.

The Kindle has been praised for the selection of texts available - more than 100,000 books, blogs and newspapers - and for the speed of delivery, which averages less than a minute. Fans include authors such as Toni Morrison, Michael Lewis and Neil Gaiman.

Publishing is older by centuries than the music and film industries and its form of communication, the paper text, has proved far more durable than the vinyl record, eight-track tape or videocassette. New technologies, from the CD to the DVD, are usually more convenient and more effective than the ones they replace. But no ebook device has approached the practical and aesthetic appeal of the traditional book.

"Books themselves are very efficient machines, and the experience of holding a book is part of the book culture," says Farrar, Straus & Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi, who called the Kindle "flimsy" and said it reminded him of an Etch-a-Sketch toy.
"Ebooks are a growing niche for now," Smith says, "but I certainly don't see a time when everybody will be reading them. People just love what the traditional book represents to them."
Ebooks are undeniably growing. According to the International Digital Publishing Forum, sales have risen steadily over the past six years, from around $6 million (£3 million) in 2002 to around $33 million (£17 million) in 2007. Those numbers do not include many smaller publishers, or library and educational purchases, making it likely - Smith and others believe - that the market for downloads is at least two or three times larger.
Each advance inevitably leads to speculation about a post-paper world: Would bookstores become obsolete? How would publishers handle online piracy? Would authors, like some musicians, become their own bosses, bypassing the industry altogether?

Ebooks have been around for more than a decade and speculation peaked in 2000-2001, the height of the dot.com boom. Several publishing houses set up ebook divisions, and an annual ebook prize, a $50,000 award co-sponsored by Microsoft, was started. Even Barnes & Noble, Inc. formed its own ebook line, launching the brand with an original work by Dean Koontz.
The electronic future, bookseller Michael Powell of Powell's Books said in 2000, was "coming down the road at lightning speed."

Few are so bold any more. Even after tripling their reported sales, ebooks comprise less than 1 percent of the $35 billion publishing business, a figure that is unlikely to change. The ebook divisions have been shut down, the ebook award no longer exists. Barnes & Noble has abandoned the ebook field.
"The market is very narrowly confined, to New York and Seattle and to a few people who travel and read a lot," says Frank Daniels III, chief operating officer for Ingram Digital, a leading e-distributor.
"The Kindle is certainly an important next step, but I don't think it signifies the end of the evolution," Smith says. "It's all incremental, one step that takes place down the line, like in the audiobook industry."
Ebooks have made their greatest progress with their first audience: publishers. For years, publishers resisted the product they were supposed to be pushing. In a 2001 interview, the head of the Association of American Publishers, Patricia Schroeder, rolled her eyes when asked about ebook devices: "I just look at these things and they're fine, but I just think ... "
In a recent interview, Schroeder spoke favorably of ebooks, but said she still had not read one.
Public sightings of ebooks remain rare compared to MP3 players or iPhones, but ebook readers have caught on in the industry. The Hachette Book Group USA, Simon & Schuster and Random House, Inc. are among those using Sony Readers to review manuscripts and executives are far more likely to say they've read an ebook.

"It's not a conversation I'm having with people outside the industry, but I think people will increasingly use ebooks. They'll be a niche, like audiobooks. I think that's the best comparison," says Jonathan Karp, publisher of the Hachette imprint, Twelve.
"I actually read in bed with the Sony e-reader, and I love it. It's lighter than a regular book, and easier to turn the pages than with a manuscript. I don't have to lug books back and forth. I'm saving paper. It's wonderful."


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New Kindle Magazine

PopMatters.com, the independent arts and culture site on the Web, has joined with Tribune Media Services (TMS) to launch a new Amazon Kindle magazine under the PopMatters brand.

PopMatters Kindle Edition features a daily dose of features, columns, reviews, interviews, and blogs, covering all things pop culture, present and past, including music and its makers, film and its creators, books and their authors, video games, comics, and more. PopMatters Kindle Edition is currently available on a 14-day free trial and subscription basis on Amazon. TMS, the content syndication and licensing subsidiary of Chicago-based Tribune Company, distributes the magazine but has no editorial role.

"PopMatters is dedicated to bringing the best popular culture commentary to the world on the Web, in print through our new book series, and now on the innovative Amazon Kindle eBook platform," said PopMatters founder, Sarah Zupko. "Kindle is a perfect platform for our hip, urban, intellectual readership, which will enjoy Kindle's easy, portable access to our content."
Since 1999, PopMatters has been providing smart readers with sharp, entertaining writing on a wide range of topics in pop culture, offering a refuge from the usual hype and gossip. PopMatters has become one of the Web's foremost cultural sources and tastemakers, especially within the highly desirable 18-34 demographic. Content on the PopMatters.com Web site and PopMatters Kindle Edition is updated daily, Monday through Friday. A subscription to PopMatters Kindle Edition is available on Amazon for $1.49 a month.

About PopMatters

Founded in 1999 by Sarah Zupko, PopMatters, the #1 independent pop culture site on the web, is an international online magazine of art and culture that is dedicated to documenting our times and promoting cultural understanding. PopMatters is listed as one of Entertainment Weekly's favorite pop culture sites -- "Impressively comprehensive overview of music, books, movies, and more ..." Music critic Jim DeRogatis has said that "writing as thought-provoking, engaging, insightful, witty, and just plain ol' fun as much of the fare on PopMatters is a rare and wonderful thing, and it should be treasured." Notable members of the mainstream broadcast media such as the BBC, NPR, MSNBC, Radio Australia, and VH1, call upon many PopMatters writers for its opinions. Web publications such as USA Today.com, Alternet.org, and Movies.com regularly pick up links to PopMatters articles and post quotes from PopMatters writers.

About Tribune Media Services

Tribune Media Services (TMS) is a leading domestic and international provider of information and entertainment products for print, electronic and on-air media. It distributes television and movie listings and related editorial content under the TMS and Zap2it brands; syndicates and licenses comics, features and opinion columns; creates and syndicates a variety of online information products; licenses editorial content from national periodicals; and manages national advertising networks. Through its partnership with the McClatchy Company, TMS also markets news, photos, graphics and multimedia content to media clients worldwide through the McClatchy-Tribune Information Services (MCT). Headquartered in Chicago, with offices in Los Angeles, Glens Falls, N.Y., Dallas, Milwaukee, Amsterdam, London, Amman (Jordan) and Hong Kong, TMS is a subsidiary of Tribune Company. For more information about TMS and its products and services, visit tms.tribune.com.

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E-readers comparison

Cybook vs. Sony Reader vs. Hanlin vs. Iliad vs. Kindle. Conclusion:

• Too much inconvenience to use Sony Reader and Kindle outside US.
• Non-optimised PDF display is still a hassle on a typical size e-Reader screen. I have a large repository of PDFs I want to read on an e-Reader.
• The range of book available at Mobipoket is still limited. I couldn’t find most of the last 30 books I read on it.
• Iliad is still too expensive.

I will buy a Kindle if I am in US.

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Cybook vs Kindle

The popular Cybook eBook reader arrived today and we are shipping again" said Bob LiVolsi, President of BooksOnBoard (http://www.booksonboard.com/), the online eBook and audio book retailer.

BooksOnBoard remains the exclusive retailer of Cybooks for the US and Canada, although a buying club also exists for the US. "The good news and bad news is that we cannot keep them in stock" said LiVolsi, "Our Cybooks have consistently sold out within a week of their arrival here. Bookeen, the Cybook manufacturer, is working hard to catch up with demand" LiVolsi attributes the success of the Cybook to two primary factors:

(1) It is considerably lighter than the competing Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader;

(2) It reads Mobipocket format eBooks which are available from many eBook retailers and in which many customers have substantial libraries;

(3) The ease of loading eBooks made possible by Bookeen’s partnership with Mobipocket, a subsidiary of Amazon; (4) BooksOnBoard’s loyal customer base which has come to value the company’s responsive eBook support team.

The Cybook reads Mobipocket eBooks, both DRM and non-DRM. BooksOnBoard (http://www.booksonboard.com/), with possibly the largest eBook selection in the industry, carries the Mobipocket format ebooks from Mobipocket/Amazon, all of which can be read by the Cybook. BooksOnBoard offers almost 200,000 eBook and audio book titles in all major genres including romance, paranormal romance, thrillers, mysteries, romantic mysteries, biography and more.

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Ectaco electronic reader

by Jennifer L. DeLeo

Look out Sony and Amazon; there's a new e-book reader maker in town. NY-based ECTACO, known for manufacturing handheld translators, is dipping its toes into the electronic reader pool with the jetBook.

Announced today, the jetBook is an e-book reader with a built-in MP3 player that comes preloaded with an English dictionary and translating dictionaries. It has a 5-inch, high-resolution TFT display (smaller than both the Sony Reader and Kindle), but weighing a mere 7 ounces (much lighter than the other competitive models).

The jetBook features bookmarks and auto-page-turn functionality, adjustable font type and size, screen rotation support for both portrait and landscape modes, a built-in English dictionary and English to Russian, English to Polish translating dictionaries, and an SD card slot, and it runs on a Li-ion polymer battery.
Unfortunately, I couldn't get any details on the device's memory capacity, but the site does encourage downloading free e-books from the Web and onto the device, since the company doesn't offer an e-book store. The ECTACO jetBook sells for $349.95 on http://www.ectaco.com/ECTACO-jetBook.

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Electronic ink display

A concept active matrix electronic ink display called blueChute has been revealed by an employee of E Ink. The expected features include a microSD card slot, LPC2148 ARM 7 host processor, 8Track display controller board, bluetooth, hybrid frame scanner and short animation sequences.

Quoted from the source, "It is built from two thin layers of aluminum sandwiching an acrylic core. At just over 5mm thick, it is thinner than an ipod nano. About as thick as a stack of three US quarters, as shown below. Power is from four 2.6mm thick lithium polymer cells which have a combined capacity of 1360mAh. If the software does good power management this should be able to give a pretty long life."

More pictures and information can be found here.

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Moore's law for another 2 decades

The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down a bit, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months, and this is the current definition of Moore's Law, which Moore himself has blessed. Most experts, including Moore himself, expect Moore's Law to hold for at least another two decades.

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