Kindle Kindle Little Star

I wonder how many folks in the US and UK woke up yesterday to find a Kindle under their Christmas tree? Not as many perhaps as would have like them, since Amazon ran out of stock!

In the New York Times Brad Stone and Motoko Rich reckon that the ebook reader has started to take hold. Notes Gregory Cowles on the Paper Cuts blog :

Kindles are a regular sight on my train these days, and seem poised to become as ubiquitous as iPods ...

But if Amazon blew the full potential of the Christmas opportunity, it gave Sony's e-reader, currently being marketed quite agressively in the States, a more than fighting chance. Other competitors are on the horizon.

And apparently it's on the cards that soon new books will start to be published in e-book format first. That's the point at which the ereader, I think, will really start to take off.

When on earth is the technology going to come here??? I hate being left behind ...

Digital D-Day?

More ebooks vs trad book debate in the British press following the announcement yesterday that the Sony reader will be sold from September by Waterstones bookshop for £199 (which is a hell of a lot less than the cost of the iLiad favoured by Borders).

Every business on which the development will have an impact – from booksellers, publishers and e-tailers – will be watching how UK consumers take to e-book readers ...

the Bookseller notes while Graeme Neill on the Bookseller blog considers the knock-on effect for the British publishing industry, and wonders what Amazon.com will do now - they have thus far refused to discuss a UK launch date for the Kindle. (Are they playing a wait-and-see game?)

However, Neill points out :

... the most interesting thing that will happen over the 12 months is whether the public are convinced. A £199 price point is attractive to early adopters but according to our features editor Tom Tivnan, the only member of The Bookseller to use the device, it is clunky to use. With the likes of the Nintendo DS and iPod on the market, the public is used to beautifully designed products that scream 'must have'. Will the Iliad and Sony Reader capture the imagination in the same way?

John Sutherland muses about the advent on the ebook on the Guardian blog and its likely impact :

... my feeling is that the current batch of e-readers are still two electronic generations premature. We await the Model T. But the seed is sown, and we won't have to wait long - the market is too big not to be filled. Will it kill the traditional book? No more than TV killed the movies, or the movies killed the theatre. It will, of course, change the cultural constellation. But, having enjoyed 500 years of dominance, the codex book can't complain about taking a back seat for the next half millennium. ... What the e-reader means - in the not too distant future - is as much of a cultural explosion as the "rather unusual manuscript" brought with it in the 15th century. It's not a storage device but a portal, a Lewisian wardrobe, opening into new worlds. New possibilities in linkage and illustration will supplement facsimile type.

Sutherland's vision of the future of the ebook is just beautiful (and - ahem - similar to my own!) :

In a few years, you'll be able to hear the author's voice - should you so wish - or switch between script and oral versions, full-text or abbreviated text, or digest. You'll be able to "dialogue" the book, or its maker. Soundtracks will be as possible, and as enriching, as they are with movies. Media mix will create new realms of literary artistry. Perhaps even smells. ... In 20 years, we won't know how we lived without the thing.

Postscript (27/7/08) :

There's a very interesting debate about ebooks in The Observer. Author Peter Conrad makes the case against them :

My iLiad may have gobbled up the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Dickens and DH Lawrence, but somewhere inside that slim slab of grey plastic they had apparently dematerialised, waiting to be summoned from the ether, page by page. All those thick books, heavy with experience, were now weightless, like ghostly replicas of the tattered, dog-eared, much-pored-over counterparts on my shelves. ... The iLiad, I discovered when I tried it out, is itself a merely metaphoric book. What you read is 'digital print' - print without an imprint, hovering in a grey cloud on the screen, remote from the gravity of the printing press or the flourishes of human handwriting.

But novelist Naomi Alderman sees the ebook's tremendous potential :

What's most exciting about ebooks is not what they can do at the moment but what they may do in the future. The iLiad can connect to the internet: imagine reading Middlemarch and, at a touch of a button, being able to look at images of the same paintings and sculptures Dorothea looks at in Rome or, for academics, being able to see links to all articles which reference the passage you're reading. ... Works written specially for the ebook reader are an even more exciting prospect. A piece of 'ebook native' fiction may allow you to hear the birdsong while reading a romantic outdoor scene, or may automatically subscribe you to a fictional newspaper mentioned in a crime thriller. Some will consider such things gimmicky and a threat to 'proper' reading, but different kinds of text can co-exist. Audiobooks haven't killed the printed word, television hasn't killed radio. What we're seeing isn't the death of the book, but the creation of a new art form. ... That form is still in its infancy, but as a novelist I'm excited by the creative opportunities it will bring. Meanwhile, as a reader, I'm simply excited by the possibility of regaining some floorspace. The e-reader will never completely replace paper books, but it's got an awful lot to recommend it.

E-Babel?

As e-book reader iRex's iLiad goes on sale Borders in the UK (for £399) Tom Tivan in The Bookseller looks at the bewildering multiplicity of ebook formats available which has lead some to dub the situation e-babel.

(I think the little cartoon showing the battle of the railway gauges draws a very clever analogy.)

Here's a list of the devices to date :

Launched

iRex iLiad - Holland-based firm launched the first e-reader in the UK this month, sold exclusively in Borders. Uses Linux operating systems which allows third-party development. Supports wi-fi.
Formats: XHTML, .pdfs, Mobipocket.
Retail price: £399

On launchpad

Sony Reader Launched in the US in 2006 and a 2.0 version is widely tipped to be released in the UK later this year. Titles can be purchased from Sony's Connect website which has about 40,000 titles. Can play MP3 files.
Formats: BBeB Book, Adobe pdf, Jpegs, can support Microsoft Word with conversion.
Retail price: $299

Amazon Kindle Released last November in the US to much fanfare. Features include wireless connectivity which enables downloads direct to the Kindle without a computer. Currently about 125,000 Kindle titles available from Amazon.com. UK launch TBA.
Formats: Kindle (.azw), can also read non-DRM Mobipocket files.
Retail price: $399

Two to watch

Cybook Gen 3 French firm Bokeen's device launched in the US and France in October 2007. Stores up to 1,000 books and the company promises a 100-day battery life for the casual reader.
Formats: Mobipocket, PalmDoc, HTML, .txt, .pdf.
Retail price: $350

Redius Polymer Vision Spin-off of Dutch electronics giant Philips says it will launch its mobile phone/e-book reader in the UK later this year. The device, the size of a normal mobile phone, has a five-inch "rollable screen".
Formats: TBA. Retail: TBA

Save Trees, Swap Books

A passionate plea from Charlotte Northedge, on the Guardian's environmental pages, for readers to swap books rather than buy new ones.

Here's a scary fact uncovered by Greenpeace :

... one Canadian spruce produces just 24 books, which means that if you get through one book every two weeks your reading habits destroy almost one large tree every year.

The article has links to lots of book swap sites on the internet. (More here.) In the Klang Valley, there's a very active BookCrosser group who meet regularly to swap book and talk about them. They're going to be at KLAB tomorrow.

I wanted to save a few trees myself and decided finally to go and buy a Sony Reader and join the valiant e-book set. Of course the sales assistant in the Sony shop hadn't even heard of it!!!

(This was the same assistant who had told me sniffily some time before that Sony doesn't sell cassette tapes because the technology has moved on ... even though the voice recorders in the show case were the kind which use cassettes. Duh!)