The Telegraph has a
concise summary of current trends and challenges in the e-publishing industry. Summing it up:
- Sony faces competition from iRex
- Some argue that e-books fall short when compared to the sensory pleasures of a hardback ("velvety feel of their gently flickering pages beneath your fingertips")
- Revolution in publishing could turn upcoming readers into "iPods for book-lovers"
- Sony Reader is a "physical let-down" when compared to real paper
- Color, moving images, annotations will come in the next development, says Sony
- High price of the reader, plus the price of buying e-books, and DRM restrictions could lead e-publishing into another flop
- Mobile phones used successfully in Japan to market electronic manga literature
- Tachistoscopic reading: single words are flashed at a time which is supposed to improve human memory (I tried that once on my PDA and it gave me a splitting headache).