Free eBooks from your library for your eReader.

In its press release touting its new eReader, Sony Corporation also announced a new service that will allow owners of the new device to access eBooks owned by their public library..... sometimes.

The eBook store will now have a Library Finder page. Sony, working with OverDrive (www.overdrive.com), the leading global digital distributor of eBooks and to libraries, will now offer visitors to the eBook Store by Sony easy access to their local library's collection of eBooks. Thousands of libraries in the OverDrive network offer eBooks optimized for the Sony Reader, and visitors can now find these libraries by typing their zip code into the Library Finder. Through the selected library's download website, visitors can check out eBooks with a valid library card, download them to a PC and transfer to their Reader. At the end of the library's lending period, eBooks simply expire, so there are never any late fees.

The process is much more complicated than the Kindles 60 second wireless downloads and we need to wait and see what the selection and availability is like before getting too excited about this, but it could have promise.

Are eBooks Apple's next frontier?

Having sold more than 6 billion songs to date, the iTunes Store has revolutionized the music industry. It also turned mobile software into a goldmine via the iPhone’s App Store, which recently surpassed 1.5 billion downloads. Apple has yet to enter the e-book market, but it is a short hop from music and software to literature. eBook downloads is the obvious next step for the entertainment mogul Apple has become. Lookout Amazon. To quote Wired:

"What can Apple do better with e-books? For textbooks or anthologies, Apple can give iTunes users the ability to download individual chapters, priced between a few cents to a few bucks each. It would be similar to how you can currently download individual song tracks from an album. It might even have the same earthshaking potential to transform an entire industry by refocusing it on the content people actually want instead of the bundles that publishers want them to buy. (Of course, Apple would likely offer the à-la-carte purchase model in addition to the option to purchase the entire book as one download — a more attractive option for shorter works such as novels.)"

"College students would love this: Teachers rarely assign an entire textbook, so they would save hundreds of dollars by downloading only a few chapters of each textbook. Apple is already popular in the education sector, so here’s even more money to milk from students, with the textbook industry worth an estimated $9.8 billion."

"Sci-fi fans might only want one story from an anthology, or a historical researcher might target certain subjects. All Apple has to do to secure the book publishers’ enthusiastic cooperation is to offer them a generous cut of the revenues, like the 70 percent it currently offers app developers."

When Wired asked students about their interest in Amazon’s large-format Kindle DX reader. Several of them said they couldn’t imagine ditching textbooks for a Kindle DX, foreseeing challenges with tasks such as notetaking, highlighting and switching between books while writing essays.

If its interface and capabilities are anything like the iPhone’s, a touchscreen tablet would make these student-oriented tasks as easy as a few swipes and taps — far more pleasant than clunking around with the Kindle’s cheap buttons and sluggish interface. Also, students would be able to type their papers on the tablet.

Finally, an Apple tablet would have color, making it better for displaying magazine pages, which could also be purchased through the iTunes Store. It wouldn’t be saddled with a slow e-ink screen, so it could display video and browse the web.

More from Wired:

"Let’s not forget to mention the multitude of other tasks an Apple tablet will likely be able to perform if developers decide to code applications for it. Think along the lines of an interactive remote control to enhance the movie-viewing experience on your TV, or a music video player to accompany the tunes blasting from your stereo. Or, heck, even an album-cover display screen for you to gaze at while listening to music. (For more on an Apple tablet’s advantages versus current e-book readers, see Dylan Tweney’s story “Large-Screen Kindle Won’t Mean Squat if Apple Tablet Arrives.”

The market for Apple here is huge. The challenge lies in establishing the right partnerships. If Apple weaves e-books into the iTunes Store, will book publishers hop on board? Given Apple’s success in numbers, probably.

Barnes & Noble launches eBook store

With what the company claims is the world’s largest eBook store, holding more than 700,000 titles, Barnes and Noble has entered the downloadable e-Book market in a big way. Furthermore, Barnes & Noble said that it will have exclusive rights to distribute Plastic Logic’s fantastic reader device, which may be the Kindle’s biggest threat today.

More than 700,000 titles are available, which, according to Barnes & Noble, include “hundreds of new releases and bestsellers at only $9.99.” More than one million titles will be available by next year, “inclusive of every available eBook from every book publisher and every available eBook original,” the company said. The current stock also offers more than a 500,000 public domain books from Google, which can be downloaded for free.

Barnes & Noble uses and upgraded version of its eReader application, which was part of the company's Fictionwise acquisition earlier this year and is available for the iPhone and Blackberry smartphones, as well as regular Mac and Windows computers.

Kindle now under $300.

Amazon has lowered the price point of its original Kindle to $299. The Kindle - which debuted in 2007 - was initially priced at $400 and subsequently reduced to $360 in May 2008.

Amazon Spokeswoman Cinthia Portugal told the Associated Press that the reduction was not just a short-term promotion. "We've been able to increase the volume of Kindles we're manufacturing and decrease the cost of doing so," explained Portugal.

Nevertheless, the above-mentioned price cut does not apply to Amazon's recently unveiled widescreen Kindle DX which is still priced at $489.

E-ink and Prime View merge for color Kindle

Prime View International (PVI) the primary partner of E-ink who makes the displays for Amazon's Kindle, Sony's E-Reader, and Plastic Logic's electronic books has bought out its partner for an estimate $215 million. The move was specifically noted by E-ink's vice President Sriram Peruvemba as a way to simplify operations, and it will give E-ink the cash and manpower to push development of color electronic paper displays. Kindles are currently limited to black and white or grayscale imagery and in a recent interview Amazon’s Jeff Bezos said color on the Kindle was “multiple years” away.

The a newly-restructured E-Ink and PVI should accelerate development. Peruvemba pointed to the end of 2010 for when mass production will begin. That means a color Kindle may be just 18 months or so in the future.

Samsung launches "Papyrus" e-reader

The Papyrus, a touchscreen e-reader that Samsung introduced at CES earlier this year, is on its way to European and Korean markets, and a U.S. launch may be next. Leaked information suggests it's an A5-sized e-ink device (meaning it's 5.8 x 8.3 inches, a little larger than a typical paperback book, while the entire Kindle 2 measures 5.3 x 8 inches with a 6-inch screen). The "electronic paper display" screen is also a touchscreen, and though there seems to be an aluminum stylus.

The photos suggest that the device is very slim, and that Samsung, of all the e-readers we've seen so far, has nailed the styling. It has an iPhone-like curved metal edge, and the entire remaining face of the unit is plain--there's just the narrow colored bezel and the e-ink screen.

The current rumors say the Papyrus has just 512MB of memory with no memory-card slot, no Wi-Fi and no cellular WAN access. If true, it will severely limit the device's potential--there would be little room for the e-books, let alone PDFs or Word documents, and it probably won't sport an MP3 player with such little space. The lack of wireless connections also contrasts hugely to the other e-readers out there, particularly the Kindle 2 with its cellular content-serving system and associated Amazon purchasing ecosystem. That's why I'm thinking the rumors are wrong--I suspect the final Papyrus will have some or all of those features.

E-book week

This week is set aside to promote reading electronic books and other reading material. E-books are delivered to the end user electronically, and are read on devices such as Amazon’s Kindle.

It takes as many as 24 trees to produce a ton of printing paper. Up to 35% of books printed for consumers are never read but are used for display in book stores, and are eventually returned to the publisher for disposal. Given that a mature tree can produce as much oxygen in a season as 10 people inhale in a year, a serious alternative to paper books, magazines and newspapers needs to be considered and for many that alternative is e-books. Consider your carbon footprint. Read electronically.

Kindle2 and derivative works

Reading aloud and derivative works?! Oh please! Kindle2 comes along and has text to speech conversion and authors complain because reading aloud constitutes a derivative work? Seriously?! Can I still read children's books aloud for storytime? Is there an exception for that? Hmm, is storytime a public performance? Are we going to have to stop that too!?


Thanks to Public Knowledge, the WSJ and the Copyright Advisory Network.

The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age

John Siracusa looks at the past, present, and future of reading books on things that are not books. From the excellent article:

"I was pitched headfirst into the world of e-books in 2002 when I took a job with Palm Digital Media. The company, originally called Peanut Press, was founded in 1998 with a simple plan: publish books in electronic form. As it turns out, that simple plan leads directly into a technological, economic, and political hornet's nest. But thanks to some good initial decisions (more on those later), little Peanut Press did pretty well for itself in those first few years, eventually having a legitimate claim to its self-declared title of "the world's largest e-book store."

"Unfortunately, despite starting the company near the peak of the original dot-com bubble, the founders of Peanut Press lost control of the company very early on. In retrospect, this signaled an important truth that persists to this day: people don't get e-books."

eSlick Release is Imminent

Prepped for January release, the eSlick, manufactured by the same company that builds the Kindle for Amazon and sold by a company more famous for their free alternative PDF reader, Foxit Reader, boasts 600x800 reflective screen, 128MB of RAM and a claimed 8000 page battery life and a price of $229. The downside is that options for loading and viewing content of the eSlick look to be fairly limited: files, mostly PDFs, are loaded through the USB port.

Frankly, another one doomed to fail if you ask me. And it isn't necessarily because the device is crappy in any way but for me is more because the experience is crappy - as it is with ALL eBook readers. I have used a Kindle, a SONY Reader, a Palm and my iPhone to read and probably others I forget and it is just not fun. While it is nice to be able to carry a virtual library around in my pocket, I guess I am stuck in the ink on paper world. And, I am pretty sure I am not alone. As we boomers give way to the X/Y/Millennial generations I am sure expectations will change. Until then, the eReader market is gonna be tough.