03:20 PM by chrissy in E-Book General | News

The article Electronic Device Stirs Unease at Book Fair in the New York Times today covers the growth in consumer awareness around electronic book reading devices, some publishers' reactions to this being a possible tipping point for the electronic book, and the fears of some booksellers who view this as a threat to their businesses.

Some interesting paragraphs from the article:

Much of the talk was focused on the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic reader, which has gained widespread acclaim for its ease of use. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, spent much of a packed session on Friday evangelizing about the Kindle, which he said already accounts for 6 percent of his company’s unit sales of books that are available in both paper and electronic formats.

But excitement about the Kindle, which was introduced in November, also worries some publishing executives, who fear Amazon’s still-growing power as a bookseller. Those executives note that Amazon currently sells most of its Kindle books to customers for a price well below what it pays publishers, and they anticipate that it will not be long before Amazon begins using the Kindle’s popularity as a lever to demand that publishers cut prices.

Booksellers, who make up the other major group attending the publishing convention, are also concerned that electronic books could become more than a passing fancy for an electronically savvy subset of customers. "It certainly does feel like a threat," said Charles Stillwagon, the events manager at the Tattered Cover Book Store, a large independent bookseller in Denver.

Nearly all publishers say their sales of electronic books are growing exponentially. Carolyn K. Reidy, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, said its sales of electronic books will more than double this year compared to last year, after growing 40 percent in 2007 from 2006. David Shanks, the chief executive of Penguin Group USA, said his company sold more electronic books in the first four months of 2008 than in all of last year.

Much of the expected growth in electronic books can be tied to the Kindle. When Amazon introduced the product, it sold out of the machines on the first day. The company needed months to adjust its manufacturing capacity and supply chain to be able to keep Kindles in stock, which Mr. Bezos said it has now accomplished.

The chief competitor to the Kindle is the Sony Reader, which has been on the market since 2006 and has also helped boost sales of electronic books. Some technology critics have given the early advantage to the Kindle, however, which downloads books, daily newspapers and magazines wirelessly; the Sony Reader downloads content via a wired connection.

The reluctance of Amazon and Sony to release sales figures continues to make the claims of various parties difficult to substantiate, resulting in contradictory statements such as the following --

But he also claimed that Kindle users are buying more books, not simply exchanging one format for another. He said that after buying a Kindle, Amazon customers purchase just as many physical books and two and a half times as many books overall, or three electronic books for every two physical copies.

Some publishing executives dispute that claim. "We don’t see people buying both versions," Mr. Shanks said. "I think there is almost a one-to-one cannibalization."

But neither Amazon nor Sony will say how many of their products they have sold, making it impossible for publishers to assess the size of the market or for bookstore owners to evaluate the threat.

One publisher estimated that Amazon had sold roughly 10,000 Kindles, while another estimated that as many as 50,000 electronic-book readers of all types are in general circulation. But both publishers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that those figures were little more than educated guesses.

10:00 AM by Bob Russell in E-Book Readers | Alternative Devices

In my (e-)book, there are only a handful of "must have" applications for smartphones. And Pocket Tunes is definitely one of them. I've been eyeing some of the upcoming Windows Mobiles devices like the HTC Raphael or SE XPERIA X1, but wishing my favorite PalmOS applications could go with me.

But now comes wonderful news -- this awesome music and audiobook program Pocket Tunes is available for Windows Mobile devices! Usually this sort of ad copy is just a bunch of hot air, but NormSoft backs it up with the goods...

Pocket Tunes is the easiest-to-use feature-rich music player for Palm and Windows Mobile smartphones and PDAs. Try it today to find out why hundreds of thousands of customers love it!

Check out all the details at NormSoft.

Related: Six awesome things you didn't know Pocket Tunes could do

05:57 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Today Adobe unveiled the beta of their Acrobat.com online services. From the Acrobat.com blog:

Acrobat.com is a suite of online services hosted by Adobe that you can use to create documents together and share them with others. It helps people get document work done faster, without email attachments or version confusion, and it makes your documents look great so that you and your work look great, too.

We are starting with three distinctive applications:

• Adobe Buzzword for creating and reviewing documents together.
• Adobe ConnectNow for holding full-fledged online web conferences with up to three people.
• The Acrobat.com organizer for sharing 5GB of files with others online, including the ability to convert 5 documents to PDF and embed your documents in blogs, wikis or other web pages

CNet has some more details and screenshots.

In a related news, the upcoming Acrobat Reader 9 (to be released in July) has been rewritten to improve start-up performance by only starting plug-ins on-demand; as a result, so we are promised, it should load two to three times faster than previous Adobe Reader incarnations (and probably also use less memory).

05:29 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

If you're an avid e-book fan and Macintosh user, you probably need some way to decipher all the various e-book formats out there and parse them on your computer. Stanza is a new application that seems to be up to the job. Not only does it claim to support a variety of formats, including ePub, LIT, Mobi, Palm, Amazon Kindle, HTML, PDF, RTF and Word, but also does it allow you to convert from one e-book type to the other for many of these formats. In addition, an open API is in the plans to allow developers to write their own format plug-ins. And as if this wasn't enough, Stanza also allows you to export content to the iPhone. From the official description:

Featuring a clean, well-organized interface, Stanza is expressly designed for reading digital publications, including electronic books, newspapers, PDFs, and general web content. Stanza is built from the ground up to make reading on your Macintosh laptop or desktop an enjoyable and hassle-free experience. It gives special attention to details that are usually overlooked in other software readers such as hyphenation, text columnation, automatic text scrolling, and user-friendly page and chapter navigation. Lengthy content that can be tedious to read using a web browser or PDF viewer is easy and natural with Stanza.

The free beta version is available for download here.

Thanks to Marc from Lexcycle for the tip!

11:09 AM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

Dustin Wax at LifeHack has just published a very nice beginner's guide to e-books.

He covers formats, sources of e-books and how to read them. Nicely done, even if he did leave a few things out... like the great e-book library at MobileRead!

11:00 AM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

Authors will do just about anything to get their work known. After all, if no one knows about your book, then no one will read or buy it. That's why so many authors and publishers are finding success by giving away free e-books. The name of the game is exposure.

Well, one unusual author, Tung Desem Waringin, has decided to take a new approach to publicity by dumping dropping over $10,000 (100 million rupiah) from an airplane while circling eight times over a soccer field in Serang, Indonesia. That's a lot of money when many Indonesians live on less than two dollars a day.

He was not allowed to do the event over the larger city of Jakarta for fear of chaos. But he is no stranger to publicity. According to CNN, "Three years ago, the 42-year-old motivational speaker rode a horse along Jakarta's main streets dressed as one of the country's most celebrated war heroes to launch his first book. The book went on to become a best-seller." Not surprisingly, his new book is called "Marketing Revolution".

Hey Steve Jordan... don't you have a new book coming out soon? If you decide to drop cash from a plane, let me know where -- so I can buy a big net!

09:47 AM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

Many of our MobileRead faithful are also fans of the TeleRead blog because they do a fantastic job over there at covering e-book news and fighting the good fight to communicate the impact of DRM issues and format dispersion. You may have heard of the phrase "Tower of eBabel" which was coined by TeleRead's David Rothman.

At any rate, some of you have probably already noticed that you haven't been able to get to the site for a bit. Robert Nagle has contacted me to share that the temporary outage is due to a fire at their hosting service, and they are currently working on their recovery. They are hoping to have the site back up today, but even if it takes a while longer you can be confident they will be back.

Our best wishes go out to David, Robert and the whole team over at TeleRead for a speedy site recovery.

08:50 AM by Argel in E-Book General | News

An excellent analysis of the Kindle and its place in Amazon's long-term strategy on the Telco 2.0 blog. It includes the claim that, for works available in Kindle format, 6% of their sales are coming via the Kindle - though no detailed evidence is presented. Still, well worth a read.

http://www.telco2.net/blog/2008/05/a...ess_troja.html