Wednesday, September 02, 2009

Electronic-book readers multiply

The Economist reports that Sony is about to market a new eBook platform, and to collaborate with Google to offer a million books for its new reader, free!
Last month Barnes & Noble, a bookstore chain, unveiled an e-store with over 700,000 titles. Forrester, a research firm, reckons such activity will help boost sales of electronic readers from 3m units this year to 13m by 2013.
I have the first model Kindle and I like it. I don't use it as much as I expected, and I am way in the hole financially. I only find about half the books I want to read, and the price of the digital book is not much better than that of the real book at Borders with the regular discounts,.
Yet there are already signs that consumers may prefer to read e-books on devices that do other things as well. According to some estimates, more people use Apple’s iPhone to read digital texts than use the Kindle. And Apple is hard at work developing a multimedia “tablet” that will probably act as an e-book reader too. Gizmos such as these are the likeliest heroes of the next chapter of electronic bookselling
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