Tim Beyers: Amazon/Apple Strategic Positioning for the Coming Battle

From Motley Fool:

Beyers says Amazon leads Apple when it comes to scale.

Publishers still see Amazon as the king, and that's not going to change. Apple has a long way to go to overcome Amazon's volume lead in terms of books, in terms of content yields. It's not like Apple won't strike great deals with publishers. But they're way behind Amazon in terms of doing deals with publishers. And I think the competition is going to heat up. Ultimately, I think that benefits publishers, because if Apple and Amazon knock heads, maybe publishers get some favorable terms. And you know, this is one of those things where users just get more access to more great content; and that's great for users. But at the same time, I don't really think it's a foregone conclusion that Apple takes over this market. The publisher relationships still belong to Amazon.

But Apple has the advantage of the iPad's flexibility.

The iPad is a great device. Now that it's out and consumers love it, there's really almost no interest in buying a brand-new piece of Kindle hardware, and the iPad has proven to be that good. And I admit, I was a skeptic on this. I thought of the iPad as a large iPod Touch, and I wasn't certain that it was going to knock the Kindle off its perch. Now, in terms of hardware, it does look like the iPad is the device to beat. And some of the research suggests that people not only love it for the hardware, but they love it for apps. And even more important, they love it for newspapers and magazines. That's a really big advantage for Apple. So as much as Amazon has the book publishers in its corner, very quickly Apple could find the newspaper and magazine publishers in its corner, and that makes this battle very interesting.

Expensive Information - Fences on the Electronic Frontier

Note Michael Hirschorn's very important essay, "Closing the Digital Frontier," in the July/August Atlantic. Hirschorn takes a hard look at how the shift from the Web browser to the smart phone changes the terrain of cyberspace, erecting fences on the once-wild and lawless landscape. It is important to remember that Stewart Brand, in famously saying information wants to be free, insisted in the same breath that it also wants to be expensive. Hirschorn:

The era of the Web browser’s dominance is coming to a close. And the Internet’s founding ideology — that information wants to be free, and that attempts to constrain it are not only hopeless but immoral — suddenly seems naive and stale in the new age of apps, smart phones, and pricing plans. What will this mean for the future of the media — and of the Web itself? ...

Despite its Department of Defense origins, the matrixed, hyperlinked Internet was both cause and effect of the libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley. The open-source mentality, in theory if not always in practice, proved useful for the tech and Internet worlds. Facebook and Twitter achieved massive scale quickly by creating an open system accessible to outside developers, though that openness is at times more about branding than anything else—as Twitter’s fellow travelers are now finding out. Mainframe behemoths like IBM wave the bloody shirt of Linux, the nonprofit open-source competitor of Microsoft Windows, any time they need to prove their bona fides to the tech community. Ironically, only the “old” entertainment and media industries, it seems, took open and free literally, striving to prove that they were fit for the digital era’s freewheeling information/entertainment bazaar by making their most expensively produced products available for free on the Internet. As a result, they undermined in little more than a decade a value proposition they had spent more than a century building up. ...

But now, it seems, things are changing all over again. The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995. In the U.S., there are only three major cell-phone networks, a handful of smart-phone makers, and just one Apple, a company that has spent the entire Internet era fighting the idea of open (as anyone who has tried to move legally purchased digital downloads among devices can attest). As far back as the ’80s, when Apple launched the desktop-publishing revolution, the company has always made the case that the bourgeois comforts of an artfully constructed end-to-end solution, despite its limits, were superior to the freedom and danger of the digital badlands.

Apple, for once, is swimming with the tide. After 15 years of fruitless experimentation, media companies are realizing that an advertising-supported model is not the way to succeed on the Web and they are, at last, seeking to get consumers to pay for their content. They are operating on the largely correct assumption that people will be more likely to pay for consumer-friendly apps via the iPad, and a multitude of competing devices due out this year, than they are to subscribe to the same old kludgy Web site they have been using freely for years. As a result, media companies will soon be pushing their best and most timely content through their apps instead of their Web sites. ...

Editorial Advisory Board for New Street Communications, LLC

I'm delighted to announce the editorial advisory board for New Street Communications: John Perry Barlow, Arthur Goldwag, John Hanson Mitchell, Tao Seeger and Michael Stein. Bios here.

ISBNs for eBooks?

I've spent some time recently looking into the question of ISBNs for eBooks. Amazon does not require them for Kindle editions. But Google Editions intends to require them, and has worked out an agreement with the U.S. ISBN Agency (i.e., the Bowker monopoly governing such things in the US) to see to it that this happens. Publishers as a sector are still dithering back and forth as to whether or not ISBNs are truly essential for digital publications. I personally don't see why ISBNs should be integral for products that are not sold via brick-and-mortar retail. Apple, however, wants you to have an ISBN for iBooks. This can turn into an expensive proposition for small presses, what with the traditional fixed-cost of an ISBN regardless of sales. However, per John Chow, Apple has a solution that is worth exploring. Italics are mine:

If you don’t know how to get an ISBN number, Apple suggests that you use an Apple-approved aggregator. These are firms that have a financial arrangement with Apple and can provide you with a number of services.

For example, Bookbaby charge $49 per book the first year and then $19 per book each year the book is in the store. For an additional $19 they will register your ISBN number. They’re convert your eBook to the ePub format for another $19. Other services takes no upfront money but instead take a cut of the profits. You’ll have to decide which service is best for you or you can bypass the aggregators and try to do everything yourself.

Then there is also another question: If ISBN a "must-have," then just one ISBN for all eBook editions of a particular work, or separate ISBNs for Kindle, iBooks, etc.? I'm still digging.

Kindle on iPad

Commenting on his experience of the iPad for the reading of eBooks, Atlantic senior editor Clive Crook indicates a habit of usage that seems to be fairly typical. Kindle books on the iPad platform, using the Kindle app:

[The iPad] is a bit too big. It is a bit too heavy. But one quickly adapts and it soon feels natural. The key thing is that it has replaced my Kindle. Almost. I might still prefer my Kindle on the beach, say, because the screen is easier to read in very bright light and I wouldn't want to get sand on my iPad. In all normal lighting conditions the iPad is a lot easier to read. Friends report eyestrain from the backlit display. This seems to vary from person to person. I have now read half a dozen books on it, and I find it comfortable hour after hour.

I use the Kindle app, rather than Apple's IBooks. I already have a ton (as it were) of Kindle books. It is nice, but inessential, that the iPad app keeps places, bookmarks and notes synchronized across devices. iBooks is better-looking and has search and a dictionary, like the Kindle device but unlike the Kindle app. On the other hand the Kindle app can do white text on black for reading in bed without annoying your wife. For now the main thing is that Amazon's range of titles is much bigger.

New Sony Patent: solar charged e-reader/laptop built from two touchscreens

I missed this, which popped more than a week ago. From VentureBeat:

A patent application filed by Sony depicts a folding two-screen device that can be held like a book, or typed on like a laptop.

The patent paperwork explicitly states that there are “first and second touchscreens,” that “the image of a keyboard” could appear on one screen, and that “electronic book files” would be storable. The device would be “connectable to a solar charger.” ...

Sony’s device seems a more direct attempt to create an alternative to low-cost netbook laptops, one that doubles as a book-like reader. The obvious two benefits are a lower overall price and only one gadget to carry instead of two.

The concept of a laptop with a touchscreen keyboard has a novelty appeal, but it also says something about the intended market: Unlike the road warriors of the past who carried top-of-the-line laptops for constant typing, there’s a new demographic of mobile content consumers and producers that sticks to short messages. They don’t need a ThinkPad-grade keyboard to type on. Hopefully for Sony, they’ll be able to build a sexy-looking device that can serve as a status symbol like the company’s early Vaio laptops. ...

Not Ignoring the Blog ...

I'm not ignoring the blog. I just literally can't find anything of importance to catalogue this morning. Onward and upward.

New Virginia Quarterly Review iPad Edition

From Publishers Weekly:

The Virginia Quarterly Review has created a digital edition specifically tailored for the iPad. The literary magazine from the University of Virginia has become one of the first magazines to create such an edition and sell it directly through Apple's iBookstore. A free 29-page sample of the magazine's current issue can be downloaded here. VQR is selling its digital editions for $3.99, as compared to the $14.99 price for the print issue.

Speaking to the magazine's push to get into the iBookstore, managing editor Kevin Morrissey said one attractive feature with Apple's storefront is the fact that it supports ePub. "It is important to us that we distribute VQR in a manner that is open, unencumbered by the limitations of digital rights management and patents," Morrissey explained. The magazine also created the ePub edition in-house which developer Waldo Jaquith said "is a testament to the simplicity of the format." Jaquith added that creating the digital editions proved economical for the magazine. "Rather than building a stand-alone app for the iPad, as so many other magazines have done, we were able to leverage our existing website content and create this version at a fraction of the cost of a proprietary app."

Former Lulu Exec Launches Outer Banks Publishing

From Publishers Weekly's Calvin Reid:

Anthony Policastro, a former business analyst at self-publishing vendor Lulu.com, has launched the Outer Banks Publishing Group, a new publishing venture that will focus on digital publishing and the use of social media to build an audience for POD print releases.

Outer Banks Publishing offers a different model than Lulu.com. Policastro said OBP is not a self-publishing vendor like Lulu, but a hybrid publishing model that combines selective editorial content with new media publishing and promoting platforms. Policastro said he solicits manuscripts like a traditional publisher and is selective about what he publishes. However, OBP does not offer advances. Instead, Policastro says he offers writers the chance to publish their books in e-book format and his experience and expertise in using a wide variety of social media and viral marketing strategies and technologies to promote and market the book online.

His plan is to publish books initially in e-book format; create buzz on the Internet through social media and then move to POD print publication when the initial e-book edition has “proven itself” by generating digital book sales. Outer Banks, Policastro said, will show its authors how to create a significant web presence with blog tours, web sites, blogs and web optimization.”

A former magazine editor and blogger as well as a novelist—he has self-pubbed two novels of his own through Outer Banks—Politcastro said he is about to publish an updated edition of Martin Brossman’s Social Media and Online Resource Directory for Business, and is currently considering several manuscripts for publication.

According to Politcastro, “The publishing industry is moving too slow to adapt these new technologies,” and that Outer Banks is “bridging the gap between authors and publishers and getting more authors in print.”

Outer Banks and my New Street Communications are both aimed at bridging the same gap, although at New Street we'll make digital and POD editions available simultaneously. We'll also focus less on over-the-transom manuscripts and more on titles developed and commissioned in-house. Plus New Street is exclusively nonfiction.

Excellent Consideration of B&N and eBooks

Note Lydia Dishman's insightful analysis of B&N's position/strategy in the eBook universe. This comes from bnet:

Perhaps it’s a calculated management sleight of hand, but while Amazon (AMZN) and Apple (APPL) duke it out for the e-book crown, Barnes & Noble (BKS) is working in the background, making moves to position itself as the biggest player in the market.

What’s interesting is how a series of small moves can add up to a big impact.

Take the latest promotion: get free coffee with the download of the B&N eReader app. As part of an overall Nook promotion (which runs through June27) store customers can download the app, then show the B&N Café barista show an open eBook on a Nook or the eReader software on their iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, HTC HD2, or a Windows PC or Mac and snag a free tall coffee. Nook owners can also get the freebie just for bringing their device into any store.

Sure a cup of joe doesn’t seem like much of a perk (except to your sluggish system), but it shows that in crafting an overall digital strategy, the world’s largest bookseller isn’t forgetting that its bricks need to be tended alongside clicks.

Also encouraging the brick/click crossover is B&N’s other freebie promotion. Nook and eReader users can come in the store, flash their device, and download an e-book from a bestselling author at no cost. It’s not just a one-shot either. New titles are offered each week ...

Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble are anticipating apps for Android to launch this summer. Meanwhile, through ereader.com , B&N is offering a beta version for Droid as well as a plethora of other devices that Amazon currently isn't serving.

What remains to be seen how well B&N will leverage its new digital self-publishing platform. If it manages to negotiate competitive royalty rates for authors and independent publishers on PubIt!, the world’s largest bookstore may indeed become the smartest as well, bypassing the trade publishers and snapping up thousands of exclusive new e-books.

Will eBooks Make Midlist Authors Extinct?

Of course not. Quite to the contrary. eBooks remove barriers. But I'll catalogue this essay anyway and file it under a new category: Luddites Whining.

iRex/Illiad Troubles

From MobilitySite:

iRex, the Dutch company that produced the Illiad ebook reader for several years, and recently started selling their new DR800 reader in Best Buy stores has filed for Chapter 11. Whether they will proceed to bankruptcy isn’t clear yet, but iRex brass are apparently hopeful this can be turned around. Analysts are less so.

It's not hard to see where iRex’s troubles have stemmed from. It has zero consumer name recognition in a field that is now populated by Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Sony and…oh yeah, Apple. Beyond that iRex doesn’t have it’s own online bookstore, which is a prime moneyspinner and awareness factory for those four competitors I already mentioned. ...

From China: The Green Book - "World's Lightest eReader"

From Inhabit.com:

Want an e-reader that’s lighter, smaller, and more streamlined than either the iPad or the Kindle? You can have one — if you speak Chinese. Taiwanese company Green Book Inc. recently unveiled the Green Book — the world’s lightest e-reader — at the Computex Taipei trade show.

The pocket-sized Green Book weighs just 0.4 pounds, compared to the iPad’s 1.5 pounds. Green Book offers a tiny six inch screen and 32 gigabytes of memory, or enough memory to store 30,000 books. The device can read 8,000 pages per full battery charge — more than enough for a week’s worth of reading sessions.

But despite the Green Book’s impressive portability, Amazon and Apple won’t have too much to worry about in the English-speaking world. Unlike the Kindle and iPad, Green Book is intended primarily for Chinese-language titles.

Coffee and eBooks

Barnes & Noble has mounted an interesting promotion designed to use downloadable eBook content to drive customer traffic to B&N brick & mortar establishments. Check it out. And here's where you can download the app in question.

This Just In: New York Times Objects to the Reading of Its Feed

Or so it would seem. Embattled reactionary old media Luddites trying to create false scarcity.

More Apple WWDC iBooks Noise - Syncing, PDFs, and Agnosticism

From MobilitySite:

Slipped into all the noise of the iPhone 4 announcement, Steve Jobs had some interesting [comments] concerning the future of iBooks. As we all assumed he would, he followed the normal Apple pattern of announcing expanded functionality for a product announced in the previous big event. In this case Apple is opening up iBooks to PDF reading, annotations and proper bookmarking, which are very important steps in the evolution of the product.

Even more interesting is that Apple is moving iBooks squarely into position to compete with the Kindle head on. For one thing, they are porting the iBooks functionality to the iPhone as well, and I assume the iPod Touch if not now then in the near future when they release iOS 4 for that device. This gives at least a hint that Apple is buying into the prevailing business models for other ebook vendors such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, that ebook reader software should be agnostic, and not be tied down to a single device. Whether this means that we will see Apple providing the iBooks software for Windows Phone 7 or Android, I don’t know yet…however I am almost certain we will at least see iBooks Reader for Mac and Windows. Remember that Apple’s media empire didn’t really get going until they provided iTunes for Windows.

In addition, Apple is taking the incredibly important step of making books you buy from the iBookstore load and sync on ALL devices running iBooks. So when you close your book on your iPad, it opens to the same place on your iPhone. This mimics Kindle’s WhisperSync technology which would be essential if Apple means to seriously compete with Amazon in ebooks, especially since B&N PROMISES this ability, but their forums are filled with comments that it has yet to work. If Apple can sync iBooks between the iPad and iPhone before you can sync B&N Reader between them, or between a Nook and your iPhone for that matter, then that will give Apple a major advantage. ...

Apple Grabs 22% of eBook Market for Past 65 Days, Announces iBooks Enhancements

All of this from the San Francisco Apple Worldwide Developers Conference as reported by AppleInsider's Sam Oliver:

Apple revealed that iBooks will allow for wireless syncing across devices, including purchased content and user-added content such as bookmarks, notes and highlighting. The wireless capabilities will be available free of charge for iBooks users on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

[Steve Jobs also announced a new version of the iBooks app] due out later this month that will add new features that will let users highlight text, paste sticky notes, bookmark pages, and add bookmarks to the title's table of contents.

[Jobs said that the new iBooks would] add support for PDFs, a feature widely requested for its e-book platform. The new update will be available later this month, and will feature a separate bookshelf for users to view their PDF.

In the first 65 days [of the iBookstore], Jobs said users have downloaded more than 5 million books -- amounting to 2.5 eBooks for every iPad sold and giving Apple a near-instant 22% slice of the eBook market. Five of the six largest publishers in the world are on board with iBooks, releasing content for the Apple-supported format.

Note this useful analysis from the Nieman Journalism Lab's Joshua Benton:

In the two months since the iPad launched — and with it Apple’s new ebook platform, iBooks — Apple has taken over a remarkable 22 percent of the ebook market. (That’s based on data from five of the six major publishing companies; the sixth, Random House, isn’t on the iPad.)

In one sentence, Jobs revealed more hard data about ebook sales than Amazon has in 2.5 years of the Kindle. (I exaggerate, but only slightly. Amazon still hasn’t unveiled any hard numbers on Kindle device or ebook sales. Maybe this will prompt them.)

Those Apple ebook sales are based on the 2 million iPads sold, which are the only Apple devices that have iBooks. But iBooks is coming to the iPhone and iPod touch later this month — around the same time Jobs said the 100 millionth iPhone OS device will be sold. In other words, iBooks’ momentum is about to get punched up.

IDW Developing Digital Comics Across a Wide Range of Platforms

From Digital Spy:

The publisher is working with companies including Apple and Sony, making its comics available on the iPhone, iPad and PSP. Among the products being offered is Jeff Smith's legendary Bone comic and his current series Rasl.

Consumer Reports: Kindle Best Value Among eReaders

From Consumer Reports:

Despite improvement to the rival Barnes & Noble Nook e-book reader and the arrival of Apple’s iPad tablet computer, which offers e-reader capability, Amazon’s Kindle is still the best choice for most consumers. ...

Consumer Reports testers recently put nine e-book readers through comprehensive lab tests. Amazon’s Kindle, $260, and its super-sized sibling, the Kindle DX, $490, had crisper, more readable type than any other model ...

The Kindles were among the fastest at refreshing and turning pages. For most users, the lower-priced Kindle is a better choice than the DX because of its lighter weight and smaller size, unless extra real estate is needed for reading content such as e-textbooks.

Two e-readers from Sony – the Daily Edition PRS900BC, $400, and the Touch Edition PRS600SC, $280, were solid performers in Consumer Reports lab tests and noted for their versatility – including their ability to be used as digital notepads for text or drawings. However, the Daily Edition is expensive and heavy and the Touch Edition is among the rated models that do not feature unlimited, free, 3G wireless data network access which means consumers cannot download books whenever and wherever they want.

Consumer Reports found that Barnes & Noble’s Nook is among the faster models at turning pages, but its type was not quite as crisp as the Kindle’s and it weighs more even though both models have the same 6-inch screen size. Navigating content on the Nook was more complicated and touch controls were nonintuitive.

Consumer Reports also tested e-readers from three lesser-known brands – the Aluratek Libre eBook Reader Pro, $170, the BeBook Neo, $300, and the iRex DR 800SG, $400 – and found that all were undistinguished at best.

[Consumer Reports excluded the iPad from the formal comparative study and ranking, on the grounds that it is a diversified tablet PC as opposed to a dedicated eReader. Nevertheless, the article does speak to the iPad's eReader capabilities:]

The iPad’s iBook app, one of at least three available for the device, offers fast page turns, with a dazzling virtual image one page curling back to reveal another, and the full-color screen is more eye-catching than the monochrome displays on the e-book readers.

Type on its LCD touch screen is fine, though it is slightly less crisp than that of the best e-book readers. Compared to the most expensive e-book reader tested, Amazon’s Kindle DX, $490, Apple’s iPad is more expensive costing $500 and up and substantially heavier at 24 ounces versus the Kindle DX’s weight of 19 ounces. Consumer Reports recommends buying the iPad for e-books only if consumers are willing to compromise to get a multifunction device.

Spring Design's Android Alex eReader Doesn't Sound Like a Contender

At least not to me. Or to others. As the guys at CNET put it:

Very expensive; no access to major e-book store; color LCD appears to have a significant impact on battery life; navigation is hampered by lack of a "home" button; non-standard 2.5mm headphone jack; no support for Word files; no easy way to add new Android apps; too many fixes and additional features currently listed as "coming soon."

Add no 3G. Also add the fact that Alex uses the ancient (in tech time) Android 1.6 operating system. And no proprietary bookstore. And a price of $399. Forget it. DOA.

Stanza e-Reading App Now for iPad

Sounds like a winner, especially for e-bookstore agnostics. Scott Stein comments on CNET:

The iPad is rapidly becoming a Swiss army knife for e-reading apps of all types. Just in case you find Apple's iBooks disappointing (and most of us do), there are the Kindle, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble apps. While each has its advantages, they're generally not compatible with each other. They also make sharing and file-format recognition beyond their e-books pretty difficult.

Well, here's the good news: Stanza just hit the iPad last night.

Stanza has been a longtime favorite of iPhone and iPod Touch users--it accesses a variety of e-book stores directly, can read several formats, and has an amazing amount of font, spacing and color customization. It was a bit of a surprise to see this latest update, simply because Amazon acquired Stanza last year to create the backbone for their Kindle app. ...

The universal iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad app update that has just arrived, version 3.0, looks superficially just like Stanza did before, albeit on a larger iPad screen. Unlike the Kindle and Barnes & Noble apps, Stanza can still browse Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg, and several other book collections directly within the app. The app doesn't connect with Amazon, nor does it offer any indications of an Amazon link.

The additions to this version, however, are eye-opening: Stanza now supports PDFs and comic book files in CBR format (yes, full-color ones). That comic book reader we were excited about that costs about 7 dollars? Irrelevant.

Price? Free.

Kno Announces A Split-Screen Tablet for the College Market

This type of thing is definitely in our future, but the Kno sounds to me as if it has significant shortcomings, from price to weight to connectivity. Wired has an informative piece. Here's the good news:

The device has two 14-inch LCD touchscreens that fold in like a book. The idea is to make textbook pages fit perfectly across the screen and flow from one digital page to another. Kno made its public debut at the D8 technology conference Wednesday

The tablet will be powered by an Nvidia Tegra processor. It will include a stylus for handwriting recognition, have a full browser, support Flash and offer six to eight hours of battery life. The Kno will offer 16 GB or 32 GB of storage–enough to store 10 semesters’ worth of files, documents and books ...

But ... it'll be a very heavy tablet at 5.5 pounds (the same as the weight of your average notebook PC) priced somewhat but not much below $1,000, according to Kno. You can get an iPad for about $500 and it weighs 1.6 lbs., a Kindle $260 and 0.6 lbs.

Adding insult to injury: 3G connectivity --- not. Just wifi.

Kno is a start-up launched September '09, with much work ahead, evidently.

One last point:

But tablet-like devices from startups have been disappointing so far. Despite its 12-inch screen, the JooJoo has been widely panned for not delivering the kind of zippy, delightful experience that’s made the iPad so appealing.

Kno’s closest rival, the Entourage Edge, is also disappointing. The Edge is a dual-screen device with an E-Ink screen on the left and a 10-inch LCD display on the right. But this Frankenstein-ish monster is hobbled by a slow processor and by its weight.

Apple iPhone 4G to Have Easy Interface With iBookstore

Steve Jobs will unveil the iPhone 4G at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday. From The Telegraph:

... Now iPhone users will be able to buy and download novels from the Apple bookshop on to their iPhone. Amazon already offers a Kindle app for the iPhone and iPod touch, a long with a far wider selection of titles, but the roll-out of Apple's own ebook store to the iPhone underlines Apple's commitment to making digitised content more widely available across all of its platforms. ...

Open Road: $4 Million in Venture Capital from Kohlberg

From Publishers Weekly:

Kohlberg Ventures has increased its investment in Open Road Integrated Media LLC. The venture capital firm invested an additional $4 million in Series A financing, building upon its original $3 million investment last August. ...

Kindle To Be Sold Through Target Stores Starting Sunday

I suppose with the Nook being available at B/N brick-and-mortar stores, and the iPad being retailed from Apple stores and other electronics outlets, Amazon thought they needed a brick-and-mortar retail sales option as well. I guess this makes sense. And the people at Target say they experienced an "overwhelmingly positive" response to the Kindle when it was sales tested in 104 of their locations. Price is $259, the same as with a direct order through Amazon. Check the Boston Globe coverage.

SONY's Steve Haber: eBooks to Overtake Print Within 5 Years

From the Telegraph's Shane Richmond:

Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading business division, said: "Within five years there will be more digital content sold than physical content. Three years ago, I said within ten years but I realised that was wrong - it's within five."

He said the same patterns that Sony had seen in the digitisation of music and photography were now being repeated in the books market. ...

Sony believes that the ebook market has now passed the point of no return. Haber said: "I have multiple meetings with publishers and tell them paradigm shifts happen. You can say fortunately or unfortunately you haven't had a paradigm shift in, what, hundreds of years."

He added: "We in the consumer electronics area have a paradigm shift every year or two."

The Sony Reader range consists of two models in Europe - the Sony Reader Touch and the Sony Reader Pocket. In the US there is a third model - the Sony Reader Daily Edition, which is larger and offers wireless connectivity.

While Sony sees its devices as “immersive” readers, Haber says there is room for multi-function devices too, such as Apple’s iPad, which offers a range of ebook-reading apps. Recent research for Sony in the US by Marketing and Research Resources found that 11 per cent of iPad owners bought the device primarily for reading. ...

Asus Eee Tablet Grayscale Bloc-Note for September, Along with Eee Pad

From UberGizmo:

The Asus Eee Tablet is an electronic bloc-note that uses a 64-levels grayscale display to display black and white content at the resolution of 1024x768. Asus has built it to make the paper and pen obsolete, which is quite an ambitious goal. The device uses a pen as an input device and Asus touts that the display sensitivity is 2450 dpi, which means that we're reaching sub-pixel accuracy here. Thanks to that level of precision, Asus believes that the Eee Tablet (do not confuse it with the impressive Eee Pad!) will be an ideal note taking and sketching device. Of course, it can also display eBooks and text without a sweat.

If you are curious, the battery life is claimed to be 10 hours, and the price will be set at $199 to $299 depending on models. The Asus Eee Tablet will be commercialized in September. What do you think? In these days of multi-touch, do you miss using a pen?

Also check comments at TFTS:

Tablet haters look away as we have yet another tablet computer to show you. However, if you were expecting a Windows 7 powered touchscreen device like the Windpad 100 or Eee Pad, both of which we just showed you, you are to be disappointed. The latest device to come from ASUS is the Eee Tablet, a device that is set to hit the market alongside the Eee Pad, and with good reason.

While the Eee Pad is marketed towards those who are looking for a portable computing device that is theoretically capable of doing everything a normal computer is (thanks to Windows 7) the Eee Tablet is marketed towards an entirely different demographic.

First of all, the Eee Tablet will not feature a color screen but instead a non-backlit TFT-LCD capable of displaying 64 levels of gray. Now, you may be scratching your head wondering why you would ever want a device only capable of displaying gray ... but if you are constantly shuffling around with countless number of notebooks for any reason, this device is for you. ...

Borders, Ebook Reader, Libre Pro

From MobilitySite:

Borders, the often beleaguered second largest bookstore chain in the US has been hitting the ebook market hard the last few months, after neglecting it previously. According to reports they will be offering up to 10 different models of Ebook Reader in their stores and website (such as the new Kobo reader for $150). Most interesting to me at the moment is the one they just announced, the Aluratek Libre Pro.

The Libre is a bare bones ebook reader that has been around for a while in Europe in one form or another, but that is not the interesting part. The interesting part is the PRICE. $119 Samolians. Half the price of a Kindle or Nook, a quarter of the price of an iPad. Remember that the number that keep floating around as the sweet spot for an ebook reader to really crash the mainstream is $100? We’re getting closer.

Of course the Libre is not exactly cutting edge, but would you expect it to be? 5 inch LCD screen, no touch, no color. Only 256MB internal storage. An SD slot and USB port. Built in MP3 player. However it does come with 100 classics preinstalled which should play well with the mainstream, and then there is the price. No one can beat that price at the moment. ...

iPad - Two Million Sold in Two Months

From PC Magazine's David Murphy:

Well, that didn't take long. Apple has announced that the company has sold its two-millionth iPad, bolstered in part by the launch of the handheld device in Asia and Europe this past Friday.

And the Apple train isn't slowing down in that regard: The company plans to launch the iPad in nine more countries come July, with even more countries scheduled out as the year rolls on.

Just to put this into perspective, Apple began selling the iPad in the United States on April 3 of this year. By May 3--just 28 days after the device's release--the company was already touting that it had reached its one millionth sale. As we reported back then, it took the company's first iPhone a (seemingly) whopping 74 days to reach that plateau.

The Need for an Agnostic Universal eBook Format and Universal DRM

Thanks much to Tim O'Reilly for drawing my attention to this very important Reuters item which comes via Wired:

... Both [Amazon and Apple] want their devices — the iPad and the Kindle — to be the one consumers use to read e-books, and each wants to be the biggest virtual store were such content is sold.

For Michael Serbinis, chief executive of Kobo, a company that allows users to buy e-books and read them on most devices, that battle is a distraction to the real changes coming.

“Today you can buy a book at Barnes and Noble and you can buy a book at Walmart and you don’t have to keep them in separate rooms in your house,” he said. “You buy a book from Apple and Amazon and you have got to keep it tied up with your Apple universe or your Kindle universe.”

Ultimately, consumers want freedom, said David Shanks, chief executive of leading publisher Penguin Group USA.

“Our fondest wish is that all the devices become agnostic so that there isn’t proprietary formats and you can read wherever you want to read,” Shanks told Reuters. “First we have to get a standard that everybody embraces.”

The issue, he said, is the fear of piracy and how to set a common digital rights management system to thwart it. ...