E-Book Milestone

An important landmark in the e-book revolution has just been passed, with Amazon announcing that for the first time sales of digital books have outstripped US sales of hardbacks on its website.

David Teather in The Guardian says :

Amazon claims to have sold 143 digital books for its e-reader, the Kindle, for every 100 hardback books over the past three months. The pace of change is also accelerating. Amazon said that in the most recent four weeks, the rate reached 180 ebooks for every 100 hardbacks sold. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, said sales of the Kindle and ebooks had reached a "tipping point", with five authors including Steig Larsson, the writer of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, and Stephenie Meyer, who penned the Twilight series, each selling more than 500,000 digital books. Earlier this month, Hachette said that James Patterson had sold 1.1m ebooks to date.

But there's good news for lovers of the physical book, he says, apparently sales of hardbacks are up 22% this year in the US.

Elsewhere, David Carnon looks at what Amazon aren't telling us about the surge in e-book buying, and  Larry Dignan reckons it is the introduction of the i-Pad (and not the Kindle) that is driving sales.

Poised on the E-Brink

Can e-readers ever replace paper books, journals, magazines and other things we love to read?

asks Abby Lu in The Star's Metro section. She interviews a few guys including my own favourite tech geek, Leon Wing, Timothy Tiah of blogland's ad agency Nuffnang and Donald Kee of MPH who shows off the bookshop's e-readers.

The dingdongdingdong debate goes one with most of us not yet too sure how we'll feel about our reading delivered in this way, whether we will be full embracers or techno-luddites, or simply something sensible in-between.  If we're confused then the bookshops and publishers, take my word for it, are even more so.  We're all poised on the brink.

What We Will Lose

... there’s something else that may be lost if old-style books fade from the scene: the personality that authors — and the people who give books to others as presents — sometimes leave for posterity with their handwritten inscriptions.

Peter Khoury in The New York Times writes about some of the best book inscriptions he has come across, and laments that this added dimension to the physical book will be lost completely with the coming of ereaders.
 

Leon Roadtests Malaysia's First E-Reader

My favourite tech geek, Leon Wing, was the perfect person to review the first e-reader to be brought into the country. So how does the Hanlin V5, brought in by bookstore MPH, measure up?

MPH hasn’t gone wrong by bringing this one in

he says ... fairly diplomatically, I think.  A little underwhelmed, Leon?