E-Book Readers Bomb on College Campuses

Bloomberg Business Week

 

Amazon's Kindle and higher education were supposed to be a perfect match. But students say they're unimpressed

 

Hopes were high last fall when the Amazon Kindle DX was distributed to a group of students at seven universities around the country in a classroom pilot program for the electronic reader. With students able to download class materials and textbooks easily onto the slender 10.2-ounce device, many thought the era of carrying heavy textbooks would soon be over. Just a few months later, their hopes were dashed, as students reported that the Kindle was a poor replacement for a textbook, hard to use in the classroom, and difficult to navigate.

"It's an amazing device for recreational reading, but it's not quite ready for prime time in higher education," says Daniel Turner, associate dean of the masters and executive education programs at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business (Foster Full-Time MBA Profile), one of the schools that participated in the pilot.

It appears unlikely that the Amazon Kindle DX will be making a comeback in most college and graduate school classrooms this fall. Over the past few months, results from the pilot programs have trickled in, with most schools reporting that students were dissatisfied with the device as a classroom tool, and that many students had abandoned the Kindle just a few weeks into the experiment. At some schools, more than half the students surveyed said they wouldn't recommend the e-reader to friends for use in the classroom, citing the device's lack of flexibility, slow navigation within readings, and an inadequate file management system. Another problem that loomed over the pilot was the device's inaccessibility to the blind and the visually impaired, due to a complicated menu navigation screen that makes it hard to access the read-aloud feature. Until Amazon addresses these problems, the Kindle is unlikely to be embraced by most of the higher education community, says Tracy Gray, managing director of the National Center for Technology Innovation in Washington.

"This is really emerging technology, and probably in two to three years, these problems will be solved," says Gray. "But right now, makers of e-readers are really just working out the devil in the details."
 

Not for Case Studies

Of the seven schools that participated in the Kindle pilot, two were business schools, Foster and the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business (Darden Full-Time MBA Profile). Darden worked closely with Amazon to convert many of the case studies it uses in first-year classes to the Kindle format and selected 62 students and 10 faculty for the pilot, says Michael Koenig, Darden's director of MBA operations. While students liked some of the Kindle's features, such as the big screen and the capacity of the digital library to store hundreds of case studies, most students were unhappy overall with the user experience, Koenig says. Although the device allows students to highlight text and make notes, many complained it was difficult to use these features. Perhaps the most pressing problem, he says, was the lack of a folder management structure, which made it hard for students to keep track of the dozens of business cases they needed for class. Concludes Koenig: "When you got to the technical classes, the Kindle just could not keep up."

By the second quarter, most students had abandoned their Kindles, choosing instead to read case studies on their laptop or on paper, Koenig says. In a midterm survey, in which students were asked if they would recommend the Kindle to their fellow students, 86 percent said they wouldn't, while only 12 percent said they would advise friends to use it. Students did like using it for personal reading, however, with 96 percent of the class saying they would recommend it to friends for that purpose.

The pilot program helped Amazon gauge how the Kindle can be a more useful classroom tool, says Stephanie Mantello, a spokeswoman for Amazon. The latest software upgrade for the Kindle includes two larger font sizes, she said. The company is working on an audible menu system to help blind and vision-impaired users navigate, she added. "We will always look at ways of improving the student experience on Kindle," Mantello wrote in an email. "One day students could read all their schoolbooks on Kindle."

Joe Chard, 29, a self-described "tech geek," was itching to use an e-reader in the classroom when he arrived on Darden's campus last fall as a first-year MBA student. When he learned his MBA class section has been selected for the Kindle pilot, he couldn't believe his luck. Says Chard: "I felt like I won the lottery." But he soon realized that the Kindle would not be the ideal tool for the classroom and quickly became frustrated by its slow response time. By the time November rolled around, he had put the device aside in favor of reading class materials in PDF form on his laptop.

"It just didn't have the features or the sort of user friendliness to make it practical, let alone helpful," says Chard, now a second-year student.
 

"A Device That Doesn't Exist Yet"

Students in the Technology Management MBA program at the University of Washington's Foster School were similarly let down by their experience with the Kindle pilots, says Daniel Turner, associate dean of the school's masters and executive education programs. The school put the textbooks students needed for class on the Kindle but, unlike Darden, chose not to put case studies on the device. The pilot began in January, and students in the program were given the option of using the Kindle for class; 61 of the 77 students, or about 79 percent, decided to participate in the pilot for the first quarter. By the time the Spring quarter came around, only 17 of the original 61 in the pilot chose to continue to use it. Like the Darden students, Foster students had similar complaints about navigation and note-taking, as well as frustrations about the way graphics, images, and formulas were rendered on the device.

"There were some high hopes. It's easy to say they were not fully met," he says. "I think what students are calling for is a device that doesn't exist just yet."

For now at least, the future of e-readers on college campuses looks cloudy. The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind filed a lawsuit last year against Arizona State University for using the Kindle to distribute electronic textbooks to students, stating the device could not be used by blind students. The lawsuit has since been settled, but Arizona State and several of the other universities in the pilot, including Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Oregon's Reed College, and Pace University in New York, have agreed not to use the Kindle or any other e-reader in classes unless the device is fully accessible to the blind or visually impaired. Some universities, such as Wayne State University in Detroit, have passed resolutions stating that the school will not do any business with Amazon unless or until the Kindle is created in a manner that allows for an alternative format for the blind and visually impaired. Other schools, such as Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y., and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have passed similar resolutions.

The iPad Advantage

Many universities see the Apple (AAPL) iPad as the next frontier for e-reading devices in the classroom. "The iPads are coming," says Darden's Koenig, who says he expects to see many students toting their iPads to class next fall. Some business schools are already starting to use the iPad in the classroom. IMD business school in Switzerland announced this week that it has already started using the iPad in the classroom. The school piloted the iPad in an executive education program with Allianz Global Investors at the beginning of May, and feedback from the faculty, staff and students was "overwhelmingly postive," says IMD Professor Bettina Buchel. "I think this device will revolutionize executive education."

Other schools will likely follow suit, especially as the iPad becomes more prevalent on campus next year after more students pick them up over the summer, says Gray, of the National Center for Technology Innovation.

"I would hate to be the person at Kindle watching the explosion of the iPad," Gray says. "I think the Kindle is going to have to pedal pretty quickly to find itself competitive with the iPad. It's a game changer."

Google Editions Launching This Summer to Challenge Amazon, Apple

eWeek

 

 

Google will begin selling electronic books online as early as June, vying with the likes of Amazon and Apple in the effort to make money from digital content.

Google will sell some of the 12 million-plus books its has scanned online through Google Editions, a Webstore geared to challenge online books offered through Amazon's Kindle e-reader and Apple's iPad tablet computer.

Amazon has sold more than 3 million Kindles to date, while Apple has shipped 1 million iPads in less than a month.

While those devices keep digital books tethered through digital rights management software, Google Editions aims to lets users read books from practically any desktop, laptop or mobile gadget that features a full Web browser.

The approach is destined to appeal to users favoring more open models of content distribution, though it is unclear what sort of marketing clout Google will put into this offering. Google has sold its Nexus One smartphone through a Webstore since January, mustering sales of only 250,000 to 300,000 units.

Chris Palma, Google's manager for strategic-partner development, said at a publishing event today Google expects to launch Google Editions as early as late June or July, according to the Wall Street Journal.

A Google spokesperson confirmed Palma's statement. However, he pointed eWEEK to comments Google Books engineer Dan Clancy made in a piece that appeared in the April 26 issue of The New Yorker Magazine.

Clancy, who pegged the time frame as "middle of the year," said Google Editions will let publishers set the price of their books, which users will be able to buy after finding them on Google Book Search.

Google also plans to make e-books available for bookstores to sell, letting the stores keep the bulk of revenues.

"It's much more of an open ecosystem, where you find a way for bricks-and-mortar stores to participate in the future digital world of books," Clancy told The New Yorker's Ken Auletta. "We're quite comfortable having a diverse range of physical retailers, whereas most of the other players would like to have a less competitive space because they'd like to dominate."

Google Editions is not to be confused with Google Book Search, the company's deal with authors and publishers to scan and sell millions of orphan books, or those works for whom authors can't be found or are unknown.

Google would then let users search for them and pay to use the works, with authors and publishers taking 63 percent of the sales and Google taking the remaining 37 percent.

The Department of Justice advised the U.S. district presiding over the case to oppose the effort, leaving it in limbo until it returns to face the judge this year.

iPad could be Kindle's first real Competition

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Amazon.com, which has dominated the young but fast-growing electronic book market for the past few years with the Kindle, could get its biggest threat Saturday, when Apple releases its iPad multimedia tablet.

The Kindle starts at $259 and is designed mainly for reading text on a gray-and-black screen. The iPad starts at $499, but with the higher price comes more functions: a color touch screen for downloading books from Apple's new iBookstore, surfing the Web, playing videos and games and more.Kindle's batteries last for up to one week, as opposed to the iPad's 10 hours.

It will take time to determine whether the iPad causes a tremor in the e-reader market, a high-magnitude quake or something in between. But in the meantime people who read electronic books or are considering buying a reading device will find their choices getting more complicated.

If the Kindle e-reader falls out of favor with people drawn to Apple's offering, there could be a very thick silver lining for Amazon: It sells e-books that can be read on many kinds of devices, including the iPad and other Apple gadgets. That means the Kindle could fade and Amazon could still occupy a profitable perch in e-books.

However, Apple could find ways to tilt the field in its favor. At least for now, both the Apple iBookstore and the Kindle service will be accessible in much the same way on the iPad - as "application" icons that users can click. Eventually Apple could give its own bookstore and reading program more attention on the iPad.

Apple also could try to curry favor with publishers in a way that matters to consumers, perhaps by securing exclusive titles.

Publishers' relationships with Amazon have been strained by Amazon's insistence on charging $9.99 for some popular e-books. Publishers have complained that it is an attempt to get consumers used to unsustainably low prices. Amazon takes a loss on some books at that price, and the publishers fear that if the $9.99 tag sticks, Amazon will force publishers to lower their wholesale prices, cutting into their profits.

The iPad gives publishers an opportunity for a new pricing model. Some e-books will cost up to $14.99 initially, and Apple is insisting that publishers can't sell books at a lower price through a competitor. The iBookstore is launching with titles from major publishers such as Penguin, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan. One big publisher, Random House, has not yet struck a deal with Apple.

Amazon declined to comment on the iPad's release.

Although Amazon has tried to snag as much of the e-book market as possible since launching the Kindle in 2007, the company has never revealed how many Kindles it has sold. Analysts estimate it has sold 3 million. (Analysts believe Apple could sell that many iPads in the product's first year). Amazon has offered only sketches of the Kindle's effect on its business, such as by saying that when books are sold in both hard copy and the Kindle format, it sells 48 Kindle books for every 100 hard copies.

Compared to the Kindle, the iPad would seem to have some disadvantages. The entry-level model is nearly twice the price of the Kindle, yet it can't download books everywhere. It can do that only where it is connected to the Internet over Wi-Fi. At 1½ pounds, it is more than twice as heavy as a Kindle. And its battery lasts for just 10 hours, compared with up to a week on a Kindle when it has its wireless access on.

However, among the elements in the iPad's favor is a touch screen that is 9.7 inches diagonally, compared with 6 inches on the Kindle. Ron Skinner, 70, who lives in Las Vegas and bought a Kindle last February, says he has ordered Apple's product because he thinks it will offer a better reading experience.

Skinner, an Apple investor who reads about three books a week, says the contrast between the text and the background is too low on the Kindle's "e-ink" screen, and reading on it bothers his eyes. The difference between the Kindle screen and the iPad screen "is like daylight and dark," Skinner says.

Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies Inc., says the iPad signals the start of a larger shift away from static digital versions of books and magazines. Eventually e-books will be expected to have multimedia dimensions, with video and interactive elements, he says, which calls for something more like Apple's tablet device than something that is largely dedicated to reading.

The main question then would be whether Amazon wants to try to soup up the Kindle to be more like a tablet, or whether it will remain content to offer something more specialized. Consider that the Kindle also can surf the Web, but it's not a feature that's highlighted or encouraged much.

Amazon stock has risen about 11 percent since Apple unveiled the iPad in January, while Apple shares have climbed 13 percent. But it's possible that investors haven't seen many risks yet for Amazon because it's not yet clear how people will see the iPad.

People might not want it as an alternative to the Kindle and a laptop, says James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst. Instead, he says, they might see the iPad mainly as a big iPod, leaving room for other kinds of devices. And the hype surrounding the iPad may help Kindle sales with consumers who want a less expensive digital reading experience.

"The iPad will bring all kinds of consumer benefits that the Kindle can't even pretend to attempt," McQuivey says, "but at the same time the Kindle solves a very focused consumer need in a way the iPad can't do well."

The iPad Could Drive Readers to Distraction

The Wall Street Journal

Losing yourself in a good book? Those days could be numbered.

In this age of frantic multitasking and ubiquitous digital distraction, one form of media has remained a refuge: You could always lose yourself in a good book. But if Apple's planned iPad digital tablet succeeds as well as its iPod ancestors, those days may soon be over.

The trouble is that the iPad, due this spring, isn't just a reader with a few minor bells and whistles, like the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble nook. It's also a full-fledged Web surfer and email device, a stereo, a game player, and a machine for watching movies and TV shows. Since it will run iPhone apps, it's also potentially a telephone, a calculator, a GPS device, an instant-messaging pad, a Facebook portal, a clock, a calendar, a restaurant guide, a contraption for studying Bulgarian, a collection of nude photos, a compass, a carpenter's level and God only knows what else.

When viewed on an iPad, books we now find utterly absorbing—with fast-moving narratives that keep us up half the night turning pages—may soak up our attention a little less effectively. Just imagine trying to focus on some boring textbook in the face of all that frantic yoo-hooing from the iPad's many other groovy functions.

We already face this problem at the office. For many of us, the main tool of our labors—an Internet-connected computer—is also our primary temptation to dither, subverting our attention with email, chat invitations and the siren song of diverting Web sites. Now, with the iPad ready to invade the home, the problem is likely to follow us to our favorite reading chairs.

Distractibility, sad to say, is the human condition, and probably evolved at a time when—hey, is that a tiger?!—it was a survival adaptation. But if we can't do anything about human nature, we can control the situations in which we find ourselves. Wily Odysseus understood this when he ordered his men to bind him to their ship's mast lest he quite literally go overboard as a result of the Sirens' seductive song.

Modern-day computer users can make like Odysseus with programs such as Freedom, a free download for Macs that lets you bar yourself from the Internet until you reboot—not a huge barrier but perhaps just enough of a hurdle, and one that provides an embarrassing time-out in which to contemplate what you're about to do.

There are also programs to limit access to designated sites or to restrict them during a given period, so you can prevent yourself from wasting half your work day surfing celebrity gossip blogs. For example, Self-Control, a free add-on for the Firefox browser, intervenes when you go on a time-wasting jag to a Web site you've declared taboo. "Wrong place at the wrong time," it says. "Get back to work."

These programs are a little like the parental-control software people use to limit kids' activities on the Internet, except the parent controlling you would be . . . you. It's the kind of self-paternalism we engage in all the time by, for instance, not buying ice cream because we know we lack the willpower to abstain once it's in the house.

And for those in need of serious help, there is Covenant Eyes, a subscription service that monitors your Web doings and emails a log to your designated "accountability partner," who could be your pastor or spouse or mom—any one of whom would be sufficient deterrent for most of us. If not, Covenant Eyes also offers customizable Internet filtering—and a mobile version.

In the future more of us are likely to need this sort of thing, because technology is moving toward forcing us to use a single device for practically everything we do, making concentration on any one thing that much harder. Then again, the problem may not be so new. In "Buddenbrooks," that great novel of business, Thomas Mann writes of a weary executive: "Harassed by a thousand details, all of them unimportant, he was too weak-willed to arrive at a reasonable and fruitful arrangement of his time."

And rest assured: Thomas Buddenbrooks, in the 1870s, didn't have an iPad.

Publishers Win a Bout in E-Book Price War

NY Times

Could book publishers suddenly be in the position of telling Google what to do?

With the impending arrival of digital books on the Apple iPad and feverish negotiations with Amazon.com over e-book prices, publishers have managed to take some control — at least temporarily — of how much consumers pay for their content.

Now, as publishers enter discussions with the Web giant Google about its plan to sell digital versions of new books direct to consumers, they have a little more leverage than just a few weeks ago — at least when it comes to determining how Google will pay publishers for those e-books and how much consumers will pay for them.

Google has been talking about entering the direct e-book market, through a program it calls Google Editions, for nearly a year. But in early discussions with publishers, Google had proposed giving them a 63 percent cut of the suggested retail price, and allowing consumers to print copies of the digital books and cut and paste segments. After Apple unveiled the iPad last month, publishers indicated that Apple would give them 70 percent of the consumer price, which publishers would set.

According to several publishers who have been talking to Google, the book companies had balked at what they saw as Google’s less generous terms, and basically viewed printing and cut-and-paste as deal breakers.

Now that both Apple and Amazon have agreed to terms more to the book companies’ liking, several publishers said that their conversations with Google have taken on a more flexible tone.

These publishers, who requested anonymity because their discussions with Google are confidential, said Google had relaxed its plans to allow customers to print or cut and paste.

“Google has always been open to working with publishers as part of Google Editions, in terms of supporting an open and competitive e-book market,” said Daniel Clancy, director of Google Books.

How e-books are sold — and for how much — has been a crucial topic of debate among publishers and retailers for the last two years, as digital books have taken off. Led by Amazon.com’s Kindle electronic reading device, the e-book market is growing at a fast clip, fueled partly by cheap digital editions. Amazon and several other retailers now offer new releases and best sellers for $9.99, far less than the typical $26 cover price on hardcovers.

Publishers have been fretting that such pricing has devalued books in the minds of consumers and have been looking for ways to regain control of what readers pay. When Apple unveiled its iPad, it said it had agreements with five of the country’s six largest publishers. Under those agreements, publishers would set e-book prices — within limits — so that new releases of most general fiction and nonfiction would sell for $12.99 to $14.99. Apple will act as an agent of the publishers — a set-up known in the publishing world as the agency model — and take a 30 percent cut of each sale, leaving the rest for publishers to split with authors.

In early negotiations, the 63 percent Google had been offering publishers was based on a wholesale model, but executives briefed on the discussions said that Google was now open to talking about an agency model and was also prepared to discuss paying publishers 70 percent of each sale.

Even Amazon has been forced to back off its $9.99 pricing in an agreement with Macmillan, one of the country’s six largest publishers. In a recent dust-up after Macmillan told Amazon it was moving to the 30 percent agency model with higher consumer pricing, Amazon removed direct access to Macmillan’s physical and electronic books from its site for a week. Amazon later surrendered to the publisher’s terms.

Google’s e-book retail program would be separate from the company’s class-action settlement with authors and publishers over its book-scanning project, under which Google has scanned more than seven million volumes — mostly out of print — from several university libraries. That settlement was recently imperiled by a filing from the Department of Justice that said it still had significant legal problems with the agreement, even after a round of revisions. The settlement is subject to court approval.

Google users can already search up to about 20 percent of the content of many new books that publishers have agreed to enroll in a search program. According to publishers, Google originally said it would automatically enroll any book sold through Google Editions in the search program. An executive from at least one of the six largest publishers said the company did not agree with those terms. Mr. Clancy said that Google would not require books sold through Google Editions to be part of the search program.

Last May Tom Turvey, director of strategic partnerships at Google, told publishers at the annual BookExpo convention in New York that Google’s program for selling new e-book editions would allow consumers to read books on any device with Internet access, including mobile phones, rather than being limited to dedicated reading devices like the Amazon Kindle.

Google, without its own e-reader, wants to be a Switzerland of sorts, competing with Barnes & Noble and other e-book sellers to become the preferred digital bookstore on devices other than the iPad or the Kindle, such as Android smart phones.

In general, publishers are eager for Google to enter the e-book market because they want more competition. “We would love to have a diverse marketplace for e-books,” said Maja Thomas, senior vice president for the digital division of Hachette Book Group, which publishes blockbuster authors like James Patterson and Stephenie Meyer. Since Google would contribute to such diversity, Ms. Thomas said, “we welcome them.”

If Google does enter the e-book market, it would be one of a handful of programs under which the company sells content directly to consumers. Google generates the majority of its revenue from ad sales on its search pages and on the Web sites of publishing partners. It is now charging for content through its YouTube unit, renting digital versions of independent films tied to the Sundance Film Festival.

Amazon Removes All Macmillan E-Books

The Wall Street Journal

Amazon.com Inc. has removed all e-book titles published by Macmillan from Amazon and its Kindle e-reader site in a battle over pricing, according to a statement issued by Macmillan late Saturday.

The move follows this week's launch of Apple Inc.'s new iPad device, which is expected to shake up the publishing industry by competing directly with Amazon's Kindle reader and by enabling publishers to set their own retail prices on their books.

Macmillan CEO John Sargent said he visited Amazon on Thursday in Seattle to discuss "new terms of sales for e-books" and that by the time he returned to New York, he'd been informed that Macmillan's e-books would only be for sale on Amazon.com "through third parties," according to the statement, which appeared as an advertisement on publishing industry Web site PublishersMarketplace.com.

An Amazon spokesman didn't respond immediately to a request for comment regarding Mr. Sargent's statement.

People familiar with Amazon's action said the move by the online retailer signals its unhappiness with the prospect that e-book prices may be rising in coming months. Amazon has made discounted e-book prices a cornerstone of its digital strategy.

Macmillan, a unit of Germany's Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH, and one of the largest publishers in the U.S., boasts such top sellers as "Sarah's Key" by Tatiana de Rosnay and "Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel.

Neither was available for purchase on Amazon's Kindle e-reader on Saturday. Instead, customers saw this message: "Tell the publisher! I'd like to read this book on Kindle."

How long Amazon will continue not to sell Macmillan titles – and whether the move will spread to other publishers who also want Amazon to charge more for e-books – remains unclear. The move could be only temporary. Amazon has marketed its Kindle e-reader by trumpeting its wide selection of books.

Macmillan was one of five major publishers which announced they would begin selling their e-books on Apple's new iBooks store, a key feature of the iPad. Publishers have agreed to a new pricing model with Apple, under which they will set their own e-book prices, with Apple taking 30% of the revenue. They are expected to price many e-book titles at $12.99 and $14.99, with fewer carrying the $9.99 price that Amazon currently charges on most best-sellers.

It is expected that publishers will now seek to do business with Amazon and other e-book retailers on the same terms as with Apple. By setting their own prices, publishers would be able to eliminate discounting on Amazon and elsewhere that they believe threatens the long-term business model of publishing.

Macmillan e-books were still available for sale on Saturday at the e-bookstore at Barnes & Noble.com, a unit of Barnes & Noble Inc. Kobo, Inc., a Toronto-based e-book retailer, also said that it is continuing to sell Macmillan's e-book titles. Added Bob LiVolsi, the founder and CEO of independent e-book retailer BooksOnBoard.com, based in Austin: "As a matter of policy we won't do anything to shut down a publisher because of pricing."

Apple's Own Approach to iPad E-books Could Confuse

AP

Even as Apple's iPad will likely energize electronic reading, the new device is undermining a painstakingly constructed effort by the publishing industry to make it possible to move e-books between different electronic readers.

The slim, 1.5-pound "tablet" computer unveiled last week will be linked to Apple Inc.'s first e-book store when it goes on sale in a few months. The books, however, will not be compatible with Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle or with the major alternative e-book system.

Apple's creation of a third choice is likely to further frustrate and confuse consumers if they accumulate e-books for one device, then try to go back to read them later on a different one. The effect could be akin to having to buy a new set of CDs every time you get a new stereo system. It could also keep people from buying new e-readers as better models come out if they aren't compatible with the books they already have.

This could cool consumers' enthusiasm for e-books, the way sales of digital music downloads were hampered by a variety of copy-protection schemes.

"There are going to be some potentially painful lessons" for consumers when they try to move e-books they already own to new devices, said Nick Bogaty, senior manager of digital publishing business development at Adobe Systems Inc., which provides the major alternative e-book system.

Before the iPad's debut, there have been two main camps in the e-book industry.

The e-books that Amazon sells work only on the Kindle and on Amazon's software, which can be loaded for free on PCs and some smart phones. Everyone else, including Sony Corp., Barnes & Noble Inc. and public libraries, have gathered around Adobe's system.

Adobe doesn't sell books itself, but provides software to booksellers and libraries so they can sell and lend books that can be opened on multiple devices. Like the Kindle store, the Adobe system uses a copy-protection system that prevents buyers from reselling the books or distributing them online.

Apple would not comment about the plans for its bookstore, but Adobe said its system isn't being used by Apple.

Apple already has its own copy-protection system for iTunes and can easily extend that to e-books.

"I don't see Apple feeling like they need to come in as 'the collaborator.' That's not their style," Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said.

Apple has said it would embrace the EPUB format for its e-books. Although that's the format adopted by the Adobe camp, that alone does not ensure compatibility because Apple would be using its own copy-protection scheme on top of it.

Apple is thus set to create a third technology camp in the e-book industry. Consumers who start buying e-books and want to go back to their books after a few years would have to make sure they have a compatible device, or at least compatible software. That can be pretty complicated.

Even if Apple uses its own copy-protection system, it doesn't preclude books using the Kindle or the Adobe scheme from being read on the iPad or an iPhone as long as Apple continues to allow outside parties to develop e-reading software for the Apple devices. The user would just have to remember which book goes with which software.

However, it's unlikely that books bought from Apple's store would work on non-Apple devices, except for PCs running iTunes.

So far, no media industry has managed to unite on one copy-protection system for downloads. Music retailers, including Apple, used a variety of schemes before ultimately ditching copy protection entirely as customers found the limitations to be a big hassle. Music from iTunes couldn't be moved to a digital media player linked to Microsoft's store, and so forth.

Movies and television shows are still sold and rented with multiple copy-protection systems, though, so you can't move an iTunes video to a Microsoft Zune player.

Forrester's McQuivey believes the division into several e-book camps will persist for years, but may eventually narrow to just two alternatives, one of them being Amazon's.

He doesn't believe copy protection will ever go away for e-books. It died for music largely because CDs were never copy-protected, he noted, so consumers opted to buy them and convert them to digital files instead of buying downloads. Printed books, though they carry no copy protection, are difficult to convert to a digital format in the home.

As the market leader, Amazon has the scale to hold out with its own system, McQuivey said. Analysts estimate it has sold 3 million Kindles, and Amazon says it now sells six Kindle books for every 10 printed copies of books that are available in both formats.

All the same, the publishing industry has high hopes for the iPad, which unlike the Kindle and most other e-readers, will have a color screen that can show video.

Carolyn Reidy, the CEO of Simon & Schuster, said the iPad seems like a "terrific device," citing the clear screen and the ability to turn pages by touching a finger to the screen, as opposed to pushing a button, as the Kindle requires.

She said the fact that Apple already has 125 million customer credit card numbers through its iTunes store could add millions of potential book customers when the iPad goes on sale in two months, starting at $499.

Any disappointment because of confusion over copy protection could be offset, at least in the short term, by the excitement and publicity caused by trendsetter Apple's entry into the e-book market.

The addition of Apple to the e-book market also will likely have an effect on ongoing pricing disputes in the industry.

Amazon.com said Sunday it will give in to publishing giant Macmillan and agree to sell electronic versions of its books even at prices it considers too high. The retailer had pulled Macmillan books Saturday, including e-books for Amazon's Kindle e-reader, in a disagreement over the publisher's new pricing model for e-books.

Amazon wants to tamp down prices as it faces more competitors. But Macmillan and other publishers have criticized Amazon for charging just $9.99 for best-selling e-books on its Kindle e-reader, a price publishers say is too low and could hurt sales of higher-priced hardcovers.

Digital Piracy Hits E-Book Industry

CNN

When Dan Brown's blockbuster novel "The Lost Symbol" hit stores in September, it may have offered a peek at the future of bookselling.

On Amazon.com, the book sold more digital copies for the Kindle e-reader in its first few days than hardback editions. This was seen as something of a paradigm shift in the publishing industry, but it also may have come at a cost.

Less than 24 hours after its release, pirated digital copies of the novel were found on file-sharing sites such as Rapidshare and BitTorrent. Within days, it had been downloaded for free more than 100,000 times.

Digital piracy, long confined to music and movies, is spreading to books. And as electronic reading devices such as Amazon's Kindle, the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble's Nook, smartphones and Apple's much-anticipated "tablet" boost demand for e-books, experts say the problem may only get worse.

"It's fair to say that piracy of e-books is exploding," said Albert Greco, an industry expert and professor of marketing at Fordham University.

Sales for digital books in the second quarter of 2009 totaled almost $37 million. That's more than three times the total for the same three months in 2008, according to the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

Statistics are hard to come by, and many publishers are reluctant to discuss the subject for fear of encouraging more illegal downloads. But digital theft may pose a big headache in 2010 for the slumping publishing industry, which relies increasingly on electronic reading devices and e-books to stimulate sales.

"Piracy is a serious issue for publishers," said Hachette Book Group in a statement. The company that publishes Stephenie Meyer's wildly popular "Twilight" teen-vampire series says it "considers copyright protection to be of paramount importance."

Authors are concerned as well.

"I'd be really worried if I were Stephen King or James Patterson or a really big bestseller that when their books become completely digitized, how easy it's going to be to pirate them," said novelist and poet Sherman Alexie on Stephen Colbert's show last month.

"With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership -- of artistic ownership -- goes away," Alexie added. "It terrifies me."

And it's not just bestsellers that are targeted by thieves.

"Textbooks are frequently pirated, but so are many other categories," said Ed McCoyd, director of digital policy at AAP. "We see piracy of professional content, such as medical books and technical guides; we see a lot of general fiction and non-fiction. So it really runs the gamut."

Piracy of digital music, thanks to Napster and other file-sharing sites, has been a threat to recording companies for more than a decade. Over the years, the record companies tried different approaches to combat illegal downloading, from shutting down Web sites to encrypting songs with digital-rights management software to suing individual file-sharers.

Although illegal file-sharing of music persists, Apple's online iTunes store is now the world's biggest seller of music.

To some industry observers, this may be where the future of the book industry is heading as well. But talk to publishers and authors about what can be done to combat e-book piracy, and you'll get a wide range of opinions.

Some publishers may try to minimize theft by delaying releases of e-books for several weeks after physical copies go on sale. Simon & Schuster recently did just that with Stephen King's novel, "Under the Dome," although the publisher says the decision was made to prevent cheaper e-versions from cannibalizing hardcover sales.

Some authors have even gone as far as to shrug off e-book technology altogether. J.K Rowling has thus far refused to make any of her Harry Potter books available digitally because of piracy fears and a desire to see readers experience her books in print.

However, some evidence suggests that authors' and publishers' claims of damage from illegal piracy may be overstated.

Recent statistics have shown that consumers who purchase an e-reader buy more books than those who stick with traditional bound volumes. Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers.

Ana Maria Allessi, publisher for Harper Media at HarperCollins, told CNN, "we have to be vigilant in our punishment ... but much more attractive is to simply make the technology better, legally."

E-book technology offers so many positives for both the author and the consumer that any revenue lost to piracy may just be a necessary evil, she said.

"Consumers who invest in one of these dedicated e-book readers tend to load it up and read more," said Allessi. "And what's wrong with that?"