Ebook Reader Makes Waves
The eBook reader is gaining new ground and is in all honesty, not going to take over from it's paperback counterpart. The eBook can hold a lot more books on it's memory and gives you the benefit of carrying your entire library in a pocketbook size device.
In the article below Jack Malvern reports on the Sony's newly released models that claim to better it's rival, the Kindle. The eBook reader is a relatively new device and the traditionalists believe there is not much room for mass production. But with everything moving to internet and books already being available online and more affordable, the eBook reader could surprise us all.
Use the navigation link to view articles on eBooks on CBN's website as well as business related articles.
Is the e-book reader a new chapter for literature?
Author: Jack Malvern
The man from Sony smiled sheepishly when asked whether his two new e-book reader models are superior to conventional books. “I think that paper is a very difficult medium to better,” he admitted.
Richard Palk, Sony’s head of content and development, acknowledged that paperbacks are more suitable for reading in a bath or on a beach. He also conceded that they are more robust, available in greater variety, VAT-exempt and cheaper.
“But,” he said, “if you drop [an e-book reader] in the bath, you don’t lose the e-book. You still have the file. You own it for life.” All the owner would need to do is spend £249 (or £179 for the cheaper model) for a new electronic reader.
The e-book reader is endowed with several qualities that make it more functional than a paperback, but just how many functions does a paperback need? The Reader devices can store up to 350 books, allow users to make electronic notes and have a built-in dictionary that will give definitions of words on demand. The paperback does none of this, but then it is more than 30 times cheaper and comes with a free book of your choice.
Related Links
* Review: Hanlin e-reader
* The decline and fall of books
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* BLOG: Sony Reader launch is a digital headache
The limitations of Sony’s Reader Touch, the more expensive of the two models unveiled yesterday at the British Library in Central London, are apparent from the moment it is turned on. There has never been a paperback that begins with a warning that it is suffering from a low battery.
One of the examples of an e-book pre-loaded on to the reader is an excerpt of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams’s story about an e-book and the space travellers who rely on it. Unfortunately, the reason Adams gives for the titular Guide being published in electronic form does not apply to any book in existence.
Adams, who conceived the idea of the Guide in 1978, wrote: “The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub-messon electronic component is that if it were printed in a normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in”.
In other respects, the Reader Touch is similar to the Guide. It matches Adams’s description of a device that resembles a “largish electronic calculator” with a “screen about four inches square on which any one of a million ‘pages’ could be summoned at a moment’s notice”. It does not, however, feature the words “DON’T PANIC” in large letters.
Sadie Jones, whose book The Outcast won the First Novel category of this year’s Costa Book Award, said that the comparison of e-books with paperbacks reminded her of the joke about the special pen developed for astronauts. The apocryphal story describes how Nasa took great pains to develop a pen that worked in zero gravity and in the vacuum of space. Russian cosmonauts also tackled the problem. They used a pencil.
She continues to support e-books, however, and will issue her forthcoming novel as an e-book at the same time as it is published on paper. “I don’t think there is an apocalyptic thing whereby one thing is going to replace the other,” she said. “I think it is a big enough world for both.”
Fionnuala Duggan, director of digital operations at Random House, is confident that e-books are on the cusp of becoming mainstream in America, and that Britain will soon follow. She said that the publication of The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown’s sequel to The Da Vinci Code, may be a turning point. “I think that Dan Brown will nudge [e-books] closer to the mainstream. We are seeing a lot of crime and mystery books selling as e-books, so it is coming out of the realm of the geek, who you would expect to read sci-fi or fantasy books.”
Sony argues that its devices may come into their own when people use them to read newspapers and journals rather than books. It is difficult for this correspondent to tell whether the Reader Touch is the future of publishing. The test model has just run out of battery power.
Date Created: 2009-08-27 |
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