BBC News The latest chapter of the e-book

"While music, games and videos have all enjoyed the move to electronic hand-held devices, maybe it is a bit surprising to think that our favourite way to enjoy the written word is still on paper.

Even though the processors in MP3 players, DVD walkmans and games consoles are all powerful enough to handle plain text, the book does seem hard to beat."

"But that has not stopped people trying to bring books into the digital age."

redux [02.23.06]
BusinessWeek Digital Books Start A New Chapter

"Richard D. Warren, a 58-year-old lawyer in California, is halfway through Ken Follett's novel Jackdaws. But he doesn't bother carrying around the book itself. Instead, he has a digital version of Follett he reads on his Palm Treo each morning as he commutes by train to San Francisco from his home in Berkeley. He's a big fan of such digital books. Usually, there are around seven titles on his Treo, and he buys at least two new ones each month. "It's just so versatile," he says. "I've tried to convert some friends to this, but they think it's kind of geeky."

Geeky? For now, maybe, but not for much longer. Many experts are convinced that digital books, after plenty of false starts, are finally ready for takeoff. "Every other form of media has gone digital -- music, newspapers, movies," says Joni Evans, a top literary agent who just left the William Morris Agency to start her own company that will focus on books and technology. "We're the only industry that hasn't lived up to the pace of technology. A revolution is around the corner.""

redux [04.27.04]
Forbes The Next Chapter In Electronic Books

"The electronic book is one of those technological concepts from the 1990s that seems somewhat of a leftover. It's never really taken off the way it potentially could: It makes so much sense."

"If the e-book is going to be a hit, a few things have to happen. First there has to be a good selection of material to read, and, for publishers, that means taking the risk that their best titles may wind up being distributed for free on the Internet."

redux [10.26.02]
Prospect Good books

"For the next decade or two, the paperback book will continue to be one of the most cost-effective, portable storage devices ever invented. Upmarket hardback non-fiction is increasingly pleasing to the eye and touch and the market for these titles is also likely to remain immune to the challenge of e-books. Nevertheless, the e-book will develop a growing following-a US report claims that 180,000 electronic titles were published there in 2001-and will sit alongside other forms, such as the audio book and the bound copy as it gradually becomes established. As with all technologies, there will be generational differences. The over 35s may still retain an attachment to wads of printed paper, but for younger generations, this affection may be more fickle.

When the shift towards electronic books gets underway, the news for publishing companies is likely to be mixed."

redux [08.26.02]
The Chronicle of Higher Education Students Complain About Devices for Reading E-Books, Study Finds

"E-book technology needs some improvement before students will be willing to use e-books instead of textbooks, according to a report on a study conducted at Ball State University.

The researchers hoped to find out how using e-books compared with using textbooks, and how e-book use affected students' learning. Although the researchers started with the assumption that e-books would be just as easy to use as textbooks, they soon found that students had various complaints about the performance of the e-book devices. But students who used e-books did just as well on quizzes as those who used printed texts."

redux [07.08.02]
Washington Post E-Books Not Exactly Flying Off The Shelves

"There are those in the industry who continue to emote about the e-book and praise its capabilities, but the plain old reading public -- on the beaches, in the coffee shops, at the Metro stations -- just aren't buying into e-books. You don't see a horde of people devouring Huck Finn on a handheld or "Ulysses" on a laptop.

"So much about e-books was about simulating paper on the screen," says Mark Bernstein. "It's like vinyl siding. People rarely like simulations as much as they like the real thing.""

Tim O'Reilly Repeated Misconceptions About eBooks

"Yes, of course paper is a good technology for providing word-based information. But that is to confuse the delivery mechanism for a book with what is being delivered. A book is a wonderful artifact, to be sure, and I have more than 5000 of them in my house. But what does a book contain? Stories, ideas, facts, interpretations, the voices of people long dead or from a faraway land. A book is a user interface to the world of the mind. As Edwin Schlossberg once said, "The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think." Or imagine. Or find out what they need to know.

The eBook that simply mimics the print book on screen is a transitional form, just like the early "moving pictures" that simply pointed a camera at actors on a stage."

The Shifted Librarian Ebooks Don't Need To Fly Off Shelves

"Can someone please explain to me when it was decided that ebooks would completely replace printed books? Why is it so difficult for the media (let alone publishers) to view them as a complementary instead? (That's a rhetorical question.

Here's a novel idea - let's think of ebooks the same way we think of audiobooks. No one believes that audiobooks will replace printed material and as a result, the format carries far less pressure for market penetration and sales figures. In fact, this is one area where libraries are recognized as a valuable market. So let's all agree here and now to apply these same principles to ebooks, both text and audio. Growing sales figures and markets are a good thing. Not everyone will choose to use them, and that's okay. And libraries are a valuable market for ebooks, a fact publishers and manufacturers should acknowledge."

redux [01.22.02]
MSNBC Oprah, Bill Gates and the Future of Books

"How primitive is the current system? Later this century, kids will be amazed to learn how we used to distribute books. Think about it. We grow entire forests, chop them down, flatten them out, spread ink on them, turn them into bricks of wood pulp, which we then drive around the country on trucks. Our children won't be amazed because we were primitive--they'll be amazed that we were so rich. Current-day book publishing is a tremendously wasteful way of moving information around: while paper is a terrific display mechanism, it's a terrible transport device. Publishers take huge risks when they print and ship large quantities of books--and that's why gatekeepers like Oprah so utterly control the fate of books and authors."

"While consumers have been quick to buy MP3 players for online audio--not much different, really, than a Walkman that plays cassettes--there's simply nothing in our retail genes that drives us to buy "book players." So the e-book may have to sneak in disguised as something else."

redux [08.28.01]
The New York Times Forecasts of an E-Book Era Were, It Seems, Premature
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"A year later, however, the main advantage of electronic books appears to be that they gather no dust. Almost no one is buying. Publishers and online bookstores say only the very few best-selling electronic editions have sold more than a thousand copies, and most sell far fewer. Only a handful have generated enough revenue to cover the few hundred dollars it costs to convert their texts to digital formats."

"Consumers appear confused, Mr. Arland said, because the devices are neither computers nor hand-held organizers, nor do they connect to the Internet. The appliances download electronic books over phone lines directly from a central server.

The device has been the kind of purchase people imagined someone else might enjoy."

redux [08.12.00]
SiliconValley.Com Forget the hype, e-books still hard on the eyes

"The publishing industry has gotten very excited about electronic books lately. Random House, Time Warner and just about every other publishing giant has put out a flurry of announcements outlining grand plans for digital distribution.

Adding to the hype, Microsoft last week released its Microsoft Reader 1.5 software for the PC, and Barnesandnoble.com released 2,000 e-book titles, while promising to release 150 more each week.

Ignore all this stuff. E-book technology is just not ready. It's too hard to read on the screen."

redux [03.09.00]
Alertbox Electronic Books - A Bad Idea

"Even when electronic books gain the same reading speed as print, they will still be a bad idea. Electronic text should not mimic the old medium and its linear ways. Page turning remains a bad interface, even when it can be done more conveniently than by clicking the mouse on a "next page" button. It is an insufficient goal to make computerized text as fast as print: we need to improve on the past, not simply match it.

The basic problem is that the book is too strong a metaphor: it tends to lead designers and writers astray. Electronic text should be based on interaction, hypertext linking, navigation, search, and connections to online services and continuous updates. These new-media capabilities allow for much more powerful user experiences than a linear flow of text. Linear text may have ruled the world since the Egyptians learned to produce arbitrarily long scrolls of papyrus, but it's time to end this tradition. Nobody has time to read long reports any more: information must be dynamic and under direct control of the reader, not the author."

Xerox Research and Technology A Comparison of Reading Paper and On-Line Documents

"We report on a laboratory study that compares reading from paper to reading on-line. Critical differences have to do with the major advantages paper offers in supporting annotation while reading, quick navigation, and flexibility of spatial layout. These, in turn, allow readers to deepen their understanding of the text, extract a sense of its structure, create a plan for writing, cross-refer to other documents, and interleave reading and writing. We discuss the design implications of these findings for the development of better reading technologies."

redux [03.28.00]
Salon The revolution that wasn't

"The news that Stephen King would release a story exclusively in digital form and exclusively via the Web rode the media mountain like an intermediate skier on a black-diamond trail -- tentatively at first, then with a little more confidence and, finally, hurtling out of control, crashing into unexpected territory. The trade press gave its imprimatur, and within a few days the story spread like a virus over Web and wire. Television and radio chugged behind.

For those who've watched digital content come into its own, the frenzy was nothing short of remarkable."

"...[Publisher Simon & Schuster] seems to be proclaiming something more insidious with the publication of "Riding the Bullet": that not only can it drag us kicking and screaming into the next era of digital entertainment but that, as a traditional content provider, it can control how and when that will happen. For the consumer, it seemed to say, cyberspace offers much that is new -- speed, efficiency, lower costs. But it also reminded us that, for the moment, Old Media and traditional entertainment still rule."