This week, Amazon announced the new improved Kindle 2 E-Book Reader (EBR), and Plastic Logic announced a number of ventures to facilitate electronic publishing for their larger diagonal EBR intended for business users. Plastic Logic has new deals for e-newspapers (Financial Times, USA Today and LibreDigital) and e-magazines (Zinio), as well as distribution through Ingram Digital and Fictionwise. Other recent EBRs that have reached the market this month include one from Pixelar in the UK at about $314. It is similar in price and specs to the Sony Reader, but with more memory at 512MB compared to 128MB. Neither have wireless connection unlike the Kindle 2 or the one due from Plastic Logic.

Paul Beatty
Analyst

Mostly, the new Kindle addresses the previous criticism of its cumbersome physical interface, but retains and expands its much loved and free wireless uploading facility. There are also improvements regarding the display technology such as an increase from 4 to 16 shades of gray, and faster page turns which go via a shade of gray rather than black.

Improvements include a thinner design measuring only 0.36 inches, no more than a pencil, and weight of only 10.2 oz.

Other changes include a larger hard drive (7x greater) and 25% longer battery life, said to last 2 weeks without the wireless, and 4 days with the wireless left on. Another novel feature is provision of audio books for those occasions you might not actually look at the display, while driving for instance

Above all, Amazon is facing up to the emerging competition from those who are using their Apple i-Phones and other phones to download e-books. Now, Amazon is allowing synchronization to transfer books bought on other reading devices, retaining even the page you were reading.

In addition, Google has launched mobile editions of its e-books obtained by optical character scanning of pages. It is said that last year e-books accounted for some 10% of Amazon’s bookstore sales, and that searches on the web for e-books has risen 100%. Other analysts have estimated existing sales of the Kindle as 500,000, with estimates for over a million in 2009. "These estimates are definitely on the low side," commented Insight Media analyst Norbert Hildebrand, who created the forecast section of Insight Media report, "E-Paper Displays, Applications and the E-Book Reader Market."

However, according to a report from Nikkei, this is in stark contrast to Japan where e-book sales compared to those printed on paper are only 1.8% and show no signs of growth. Unlike Amazon, e-reader devices in Japan have no wireless connection and there are no equivalent organizations promoting an e-book library. In fact, it is said publishers there shy aware from producing e-books for fear of losing sales of printed copies. But comic books (magna) do better in Japan as they are downloaded to cell phones. In fact, they take 81% of the e-book market for cell phones, and total annual sales for e-books on cell phones had more than doubled in 2007.

Now, as good as the Kindle and Plastic Logic products sound for the US market, there are still some road blocks to universal usage including price, use of cell phones or computers, lack of color and maybe video.

Laptops may yet win the day as Pixel Qi is claiming lower cost notebooks at under $100 with new screen technology consuming 10 to 15 times less power, offering perhaps 30 hours of battery life! A working day, or continuous reading with a book might only last 8 hours, so with overnight charging, who really wants that much more?

Scrolling software such as Stanza, ScrollMotion and Smartcovers allows the convenient reading of e-books on a cell phone. This might suit some, but there remains the difficulty of reading in sunlight as well as battery life.

It seems digital books are with us and set to grow, at least outside of Japan, and particularly so if prices to fall to where e-text book readers for students are feasible, which is an eager market. No doubt the provision of sufficient reading matter with easy wireless download is crucial. Will the market gravitate towards value-improved EBRs, cell phones or improved lower-cost, lower-power laptops? My bet is on a mixture at first, depending on individual needs, then maybe more towards EBRs as their prices fall and performance improves.

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