Paperless Books! EBooks are in the News…

There are several stories coming through the internet today about Electronic Books or EBooks. Amazon is the best known with their Kindle devices and book services combination. They have put together a well coordinated method for acquiring books, magazines and newspapers electronically anywhere you have a cell phone connection. While the purchase price for a Kindle device is a little steep, quite a few new releases are available for digital download with substantial price reduction as compared with comparable hardback pricing. Amazon has released the shipping date of its new Kindle DX, a large format Kindle, for June 10, 2009. The Kindle DX is suggested to be a great unit for student text book replacements as well as making it easier to read Newspaper stories.

I have loved reading and listening to books distributed for electronic devices for many years. Currently, most of the books that I “read” are acquired through Audible.com (another Amazon recent purchase) and luckily I was an early implementer of their technology. My current subscription is grandfathered in giving me 5 selections per month for just 39.95, typically the cost of one audio book if purchased on CD or tape. In fact, I have over 800 books now in Audible format that is always in my library if I wish to listen to any of them again. The great thing about this format the industry wide acceptance of the Audible’s DRM format and the large numbers of devices that can accept the format.

I had also been an early EBook reader as well. I had very early on purchased a Rocket EBook reader that allowed me to purchase books online as well as download .txt file to the unit. It was a little clunky getting the information onto the reader but it had enough memory on it to make it worth while. It was capable of holding hundred or more books, depending on size, and it made it much easier to bring my reading material with when I was traveling.

Today’s EBook devices have better battery life because of the new page display technology. Sony and Amazon have both utilized this technology and this and their ease of acquiring books has given these kinds of devices a rebirth. This industry is in the early throws of its infancy though but it does show a lot of promise. So much so, Google today has announced that it will be offering electronic books as well in the very near future. According to a NY Times article, Google plans to make implement this program by the end of 2009. This would give Amazon a run for their money. Book publishers have complained about Amazon’s pricing strategy and with Google’s entry into this field it will give them a competitive option to choose from. (Currently Amazon charges $9.99 for most best sellers and up to as much as $25 for some new book titles).

Google has another EBook project that is still going on where they have scanned over 7 Million books, the majority of which are out of print. This project is a totally separate venture. From this project Google has made over 1 million public domain books available to mobile phones and Sony EBook Reader. Google doesn’t plan to limit the availability of these books to any specific devices.

The third news item revolves around the purchase possibility of E Ink, the company that invented and produces the e-ink displays for the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader devices by Prime View. There is a relationship between these two companies currently. E Ink provides the flexible displays and Prime View assembles them. E Ink suggests that this deal will provide the financing to  continue the development of color displays that they hope to be shipping in late 2010. This would bring the a much needed upgrade to the current EBook readers that is their main complaint today for being used for text book replacements. Hopefully they will be successful.