Reading habits may be fundamentally changing, but a new survey shows that the printed word remains fundamental.
Although many Californians who own Kindles, Nooks and other e-readers love their gadgets, they still prefer books the old-fashioned way — on paper — according to a poll by USC Dornsife and the Los Angeles Times.
Even with sales of e-readers surging, only 10% of respondents who have one said they had abandoned traditional books. More than half said most or all of the books they read are in printed form.
The pleasure of reading endures in the digital age, even with its nearly boundless options for entertainment, according to data collected from 1,500 registered state voters. Six in 10 people said they like to read "a lot," and more than 20% reported reading books for more than 10 hours a week.
Young adults — often assumed to be uninterested — read about as much as many of their elders. An overwhelming portion (84%) of those ages 18 to 29 said they like to read some or a lot; that's only a percentage point less than for respondents 50 and older. Sixty-five percent of the younger group said they read books for pleasure three or more hours a week; 69% of those 50 to 64 said the same.
And age is clearly no barrier to new habits. Folks over 50 are embracing some new reading technology at about the same rate as younger people. Twenty-two percent of those ages 18 to 49 own e-readers; 20% of people 50 and older have them.
How much education people have helps determine how much — and how — they read, the poll shows. More than 7 in 10 college-educated respondents said they read "a lot," while only half of those with no college said they did. Those who went to college are also more likely to use an e-reader.
Owners of e-readers are more likely to read books, read more books and spend more hours each week reading. About 4 in 10 said they devoured four or more books a month.
Technology has turned some people away from the printed book however. When you travel for work alot, carrying books is awkward and bulky.
But the sensation of hefting a physical book, opening its thick cover and turning its delicate pages is hard-wired in some people. Words illuminated on screens are a cold substitute.
The poll was conducted for USC's Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and the Los Angeles Times by two companies: Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and American Viewpoint. The survey took place March 14-19. The margin of error is 2.9%.
While there are plenty of ebook readers on the market, almost all of them have black-and-white displays. Chinese company Hanvon wants to change that. The company is expected to unveil the first tablet with a color E Ink screen on Tuesday at the FPD International 2010 trade show in Tokyo, the New York Times has reported.
According to the Times, 90 percent of the ebook readers on the market use monochrome display technology from the company E Ink. Hanvon will be the first company to showcase E Ink's color capabilities. E Ink's color screen is made by fitting the original black-and-white display with a color filter.
Last month, Barnes and Noble announced the Nook color, but the 7-inch screen uses LCD technology, similar to what is used in televisions and computer screens. Like many tablets on the market, Apple's iPad also uses LCD technology.
The benefits of using E Ink as opposed to LCD are that E Ink uses less battery power and can be read in direct sunlight without glare. According to the Times article, the color E Ink that will be featured on Hanvon's e-reader isn't the same quality as LCD technology on, say, an iPad, however. The colors aren't as vivid, and appear to be more muted, and the screen can't support video. This is why Amazon, for example, hasn't yet embraced color E Ink on its Kindle e-reader.
"I'm convinced that a lot of times it takes one company to prove the market," Sriram K. Peruvemba, a vice president for E Ink, told the Times.
The iPad has been available in China since Sept. 17. Hanvon's new ebook reader will go on sale in China in March for around $440. Hanvon president Liu Yingjian said the product, fitted with a 9.68-inch color screen and Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity, might be sold in the U.S. later. Hanvon, the number one ebook reader outfitter in China, sells some products in the U.S., both online and through electronics retailer Fry's.
Following price cuts from the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook, Sony last week quietly lowered the prices on its Reader e-reader hardware as well.
The Reader Pocket Edition, the cheapest model, is now $149.99, down from $169.99. Sony has priced the Touch Edition at $169.99, versus an earlier price of $199.99, and the Daily Edition now costs $299.99, down from $349.99.
On July 1, Amazon cut the price of its Kindle DX e-reader from $489 to $379, just days after Amazon lowered the price of its standard Kindle e-reader from $259 to $189. That pricing move took place the same day as rival Barnes & Noble launched a $149 Wi-Fi only version of its Nook and lowered the price of its 3G Nook by $259 to $199.
Borders, meanwhile, has chosen its Kobo e-reader, coupled with a $20 gift card, to fight back in the e-reader price war.
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."
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 tech industry and media are focused on Apple's forthcoming iPad tablet computer, a multifunction device that includes an e-book reader. Meanwhile, with much less fanfare, other companies are pressing ahead with conventional, dedicated e-readers aimed at the leader in the category: Amazon's Kindle.
These more focused, monochrome devices aren't as flashy or as versatile as the iPad, which handles everything from email to games. But they cost less and are aimed wholly at people who seek to read books and periodicals in digital form.
I've been testing one such new e-reader from a company that has been in the business for years, but is mainly known in Europe. It is called the Irex DR800SG and costs $400 at bestbuy.com—about $140 more than the Kindle. While the DR800SG uses the same electronic ink screen technology as the Kindle, it has some major differences: in screen size, in user interface, and in the way it wirelessly downloads books and newspapers.
The Irex is shorter but wider than the Kindle, and has an 8.1-inch screen, versus the Kindle's 6-inch screen. It's slightly thicker than the Kindle, but about 25% heavier. It has a single, thin page-turning and menu button on the left side, while the Kindle has larger, multiple buttons on both sides. Both devices claim to hold about 1,500 books.
Irex, a Los Angeles-based company whose products are engineered in the Netherlands, produced its first e-reader in 2004, but this new model is its first aimed specifically at the American market and its first to use the cellular 3G network for downloading content.
The new Irex has some advantages over the Kindle. Its larger screen makes for a better reading experience, allowing many more words to show on the page, at similar font sizes. The screen also seems slightly sharper.
The Irex looks sleeker than the Kindle, because it has a much thinner bezel around the screen, due mainly to the lack of a physical keyboard. It also does a better job of organizing your reading material, grouping items into separate folders for books, newspapers, and personal documents.
And, instead of being linked to a single online store, like Amazon, it uses a "mall" concept, designed to allow users to choose from many different online stores, though only two are available now. The principal merchant in the mall so far is the Barnes & Noble e-book store—the same one used on the Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader—which claims about a million titles. The other store is called NewspaperDirect, which claims over 1,000 newspapers.
However, in my tests, I found the Irex much clumsier to use than the Kindle and, because of that, I still prefer the Amazon device. For instance, the Irex requires a stylus—an ancient and fading navigation device—for some operations. Yet it lacks a holder for this pointer except in the leather cover, so the stylus is easy to lose. The Irex also lacks a Home button, a note-taking function, any way to highlight text and a built-in dictionary.
More important, I found the mall concept for downloading books to be frustrating. Because the Irex isn't seamlessly linked to its own online store, I had to establish, or sign into, four different accounts to test the device fully. Even after that, each Barnes & Noble download required multiple steps. On the Kindle, ordering books is a breeze, and they appear almost instantly after you click a single "Buy" button.
This last issue is a trade-off between greater choice and simpler, quicker functionality. Some readers will be willing to make that trade-off, especially if Irex is able to add specialized stores in the future that offer, say, a large selection of non-English-language books. But, for most Americans with typical book needs, I find the current trade-off unacceptable.
For example, books I bought from Barnes & Noble appeared slowly on the Irex. The device seemed to have to turn on its radio and establish a new connection each time. Also, until I opened each book, they appeared on the screen identified only by a geeky file name. And, after I opened each, there was a long delay while the device did something called "counting pages."
The company says that some of these shortcomings will be fixed in a software update due as soon as next month. It promises there will be a note-taking function, speedier wireless connections and the elimination of the counting-pages delay. It also says it is working on a universal log-in system for its mall of stores. But highlighting and a dictionary are only being "considered" for a future revision.
On the bright side, I was able to easily plug the Irex into a PC and Mac, and manually drag onto it personal PDF files, pictures and even a free book I bought at a Web site.
Irex says it is working on a color model for next year. I hope it works more smoothly than the DR800SG.
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."
Sony, the Japanese electronics giant, was a pioneer in the current wave of electronic book readers, introducing its first Sony Reader model back in 2006. But, it has been overtaken by Amazon.com, whose Kindle e-book reader, introduced in 2007, has become almost synonymous with the category. Now, Sony is out with a much-improved model that could make it more competitive.
Unlike the Kindle, Sony's readers weren't wireless and their owners couldn't download books or newspapers directly to the device, instead of via a computer. Now, that problem has finally been solved with Sony's new Reader Daily Edition, a handsome $400 wireless model that I've been testing.
The Daily Edition can be bought at Sony's stores; at its Web site, sonystyle.com; and at Best Buy's site, bestbuy.com. It was sold out for the holidays, but Sony says it expects new stock soon.
The Daily Edition isn't a mere clone of the Kindle. It has a different design philosophy and is stronger in some areas, weaker in others. In general, I enjoyed using it, once I mastered its user interface, which took several days. I especially liked the fact that it packs a larger screen into a comfortably small device, and mostly uses touch navigation instead of all physical controls. For instance, while the Sony does have a small page-turning button, you can more easily turn pages by just swiping your finger across the screen. It's also better at navigating digital newspapers, something I've never found very satisfying on the Kindle.
(Full disclosure: Sony has struck a special deal with Dow Jones, which owns The Wall Street Journal and this Web site. Under the deal, a special late-day edition of the Journal, containing updated news, will be available on the Daily Edition for an extra charge starting later in January.)
On the downside, the Daily Edition has three main flaws when compared with the Kindle. First, it's much more expensive—$400 versus just $259. Second, it has only about half of the commercial, copyrighted digital books that Amazon does—around 200,000 versus the Kindle's roughly 400,000. Sony also throws in a million out-of-copyright, old books, for a total of 1.2 million.
But many of these added million titles are obscure and of little interest to mainstream consumers. The Reader also has just eight newspapers, versus 92 for the Kindle, though Sony says 10 more are coming soon.
Third, the technology that makes the screen touch sensitive also dims it a bit, so the Daily Edition's screen is darker than the Kindle's. (Both are unlit monochrome screens with gray-scale graphics.) I found the Sony screen adequate, but it's tougher to read in lower light.
The Daily Edition is a slender device with a black metal body that contrasts sharply with the wider, white plastic body of the Kindle. While both products use the same basic screen technology, and the same screen width, the Daily Edition's screen is longer; it measures 7 inches versus 6 inches for the Kindle. In my tests, I found this a big advantage, because, when both devices were set for roughly comparable text sizes, the Sony could hold more text on a page, cutting down on the need for page turns, which interrupt reading.
In addition, the Daily Edition is narrower than the Kindle, because the borders around the screen are thinner, since they don't have to accommodate the Kindle's various large buttons or physical keyboard. (You can enter text for notes or searches on the Daily Edition using a stylus for handwriting or a virtual onscreen keyboard.) This longer, narrower shape gives the new Sony a nice feel in the hand.
I also preferred the Sony's method for presenting newspapers, which allowed more headlines to be viewed at once and required fewer steps to navigate through the paper.
The Sony also claims more battery life with wireless turned off, comes with a cover included—an extra-cost item on the Kindle—and can handle more book formats, including the free digital books offered by public libraries. Built-in memory is the same, but the Daily Edition's can be expanded while the Kindle's can't.
Like the Kindle, the new Sony also allows you to drag songs, pictures and some personal documents onto the device from your computer. I did this with no problems.
The Daily Edition has companion software for buying, reading and storing books on both PCs and Macs. But it has no app for a smart phone, and doesn't synchronize your last-read place in your book among the reader and the computer.
Also, I found the Daily Edition required a harder learning process than the Kindle. First, it takes awhile to get the hang of the touch gestures, partly because they require much more pressure than on, say, an iPhone. Second, using touch to bring up features and menus can be a mystery until you consult the manual. For instance, it took days to discover that you could set a bookmark by double-tapping on the upper right corner.
But, all in all, despite its higher price, the Daily Edition is a big leap for Sony and adds another good choice for consumers.
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?"
After years of anemic sales, e-books are starting to take off. As evidence: for the first time ever, Christmas Day shoppers on Amazon.com bought more books for their Kindles than they did regular books.
Obviously, this was an unusual situation -- Christmas Day isn't typically a big day for shopping, but virtually everyone who received a new Kindle e-book reader as a gift that day needed to download at least one book to try out their new device.
An E-book Milestone
The e-book has been around for years, but until recently there were questions about whether it would ever become a main-stream product. That changed with the success of the Amazon Kindle, which allows users to wirelessly purchase books from almost everywhere, and then read them on a device with a good screen and long battery life.
This retailer says the Kindle is "the most gifted item in Amazon's history".
With the success of Amazon's e-book reader -- which is on its second generation -- Barnes and Noble entered the market late this year with the nook.
More about the Kindle
The Amazon Kindle 2 debuted earlier this year. It has a 6-inch, 600-by-800-pixel e-Ink display that offers 16 shades of gray.
This device also sports 2 GB of memory, allowing it to hold more than 1,500 books.
The Kindle Store now includes over 390,000 books, including New York Times Bestsellers and New Releases.
Amazon's Kindle has been the king of the nascent, much-hyped, category of wireless e-readers since it came out in 2007. Now, numerous companies are determined to challenge the Kindle with dedicated, mass-market gadgets for reading digital books and periodicals. The latest, and potentially most important, of these is a contender called the Nook, produced by the giant bookstore chain Barnes & Noble Inc., which started shipping it this week.
The two devices look very similar, but have key differences in capabilities, user interface and polish. Overall, after testing the Nook for about a week, I don't think it's as good as the Kindle, at least not yet. At launch, the Nook has the feel of a product with great potential that was rushed to market before it was fully ready.
Like the latest standard-size Kindle, which came out earlier this year, the Nook is a roughly 8-inch by 5-inch, ivory-colored plastic tablet that costs $259 and connects wirelessly to an online store. The two devices have essentially identical reading screens, 6 inches when measured diagonally, that allow for only monochrome text and gray-scale graphics, not color. Both come with two gigabytes of internal memory, enough to hold about 1,500 digital books.
Nook's most obvious difference from Kindle is that it also boasts a second, smaller color screen beneath the main reading screen. This touch screen is used for navigating and for typing via an on-screen keyboard when performing searches or adding notes to books. Also, when the touch screen is dark, it can be swiped to turn pages instead of using the physical page-turning buttons at the sides of the main screen.
The competing Kindle (formerly called the Kindle 2, but now back to just Kindle) uses a joystick, Menu and Home buttons, and pop-up menus on the main screen for navigating. It has a physical keyboard below the screen for typing and can turn pages only using physical buttons.
Also, unlike the Kindle, the Nook lets you lend certain digital books to others for a limited period, an innovation that removes one of the most common complaints about buying books electronically instead of on paper.
Another big difference: Nook claims a catalog of just over one million digital books, versus 389,000 for the Kindle. But this is somewhat misleading, because over half of the Nook catalog is made up of free out-of-copyright titles published before 1923, the vast majority of which are likely to be of little interest to average readers. Barnes & Noble refuses to say how many modern commercial titles it offers, or even whether it has more or fewer of these than Amazon.
Amazon says it already has nearly 20,000 of the most popular such older books available and plans to add hundreds of thousands more in the coming months, to bring its total selection to more than one million.
Amazon also offers well over 100 newspapers and magazines and 7,500 blogs. Barnes & Noble says it will have about 45 periodicals in the coming weeks, but no blogs.
Both devices offer downloads of most best-sellers, but in a random, unscientific test I performed using print books from around my house, I found Amazon's commercial e-book catalog superior. Barnes & Noble lacked digital versions of two recent historical biographies I own, and had no digital editions of the works of one of my favorite contemporary mystery writers, Donna Leon. Amazon had all these books in Kindle editions. Barnes & Noble says titles like these are being added.
During my tests, I found the Nook slower, more cumbersome to use and less polished than the Kindle. I ran into various crashes and bugs. And, while the Kindle's navigation system isn't exactly world class, it ran circles around the Nook's, despite the great possibilities offered by the latter's use of the touch screen.
The Nook may be wonderful one day, but, as of today, it's no match for the Kindle, despite advantages such as lending, because it's more annoying to use.
For instance, the Nook constantly delayed taking me to books while the main screen displayed a message that said "formatting." Its standard practice is to open books you select not at the actual start of the book, but at a description of the book. Turning pages inside books was slower than on the Kindle. Looking up a word in the built-in dictionary, a quick process on the Kindle, was far harder on the Nook. Even swiping the touch screen to turn pages would suddenly stop working for periods of time.
The good news for those who have ordered a Nook, which is currently sold out, is that its software can be updated, and Barnes & Noble is promising to fix the problems, starting with a wirelessly delivered patch next week that it says will improve the speed a bit, get you closer to the start of the book, and repair some of the bugs.
Two things are worth noting here. First, I also criticized the design of the original Kindle and the original Sony e-reader, both of which have improved in subsequent iterations. (Sony, which was in this market early, is promising to release its first wireless e-reader later this month.)
Second, the entire e-reader market is still in its infancy. The lack of color in books and periodicals alone is a huge drawback. One day, I suspect both of these products will look like a 1996 Palm PDA does compared with an Apple iPhone.
The Nook is a bit shorter and narrower than the Kindle, but it is an ounce heavier and significantly thicker. It has a cleaner look, because the bezel around the screen is narrower and there is no physical keyboard. The touch screen adds a dash of color, though it often goes dark to save battery life.
Like the Kindle, the Nook has built-in cellular connectivity with no monthly charges. But it also adds Wi-Fi, which is free at Barnes & Noble stores, though mostly unusable at other commercial hotspots, because the Nook lacks a Web browser that would allow you to log in. The Kindle has a crude Web browser, but no Wi-Fi.
Speaking of battery life, the Nook's is worse than the Kindle's. It claims about 10 days of typical use with wireless off, and just two days with wireless on. In my week of tests, with wireless on constantly, I had to charge it three times. Amazon rates the Kindle at 14 days of typical use with wireless off and seven days with wireless on, which squares with my own Kindle experience.
The Nook beats the Kindle in a few areas. Lending is a key one, though only about half of the commercial titles are eligible for lending, you can lend each one only once to a given person, and loans expire after two weeks. In my tests, lending worked OK after a couple of false starts.
Another is that Barnes & Noble takes advantage of its stores. In addition to getting free Wi-Fi, Nook owners who enter a Barnes & Noble store can read books on their Nooks for free, and get help from staff members.
Unlike the Kindle, the Nook also has a slot for expandable memory cards and a replaceable battery. Barnes & Noble also has companion PC, Mac, iPhone and BlackBerry software for reading e-books, even if you don't own a Nook. Amazon has such software, so far, only for the iPhone and PC.
But, while Amazon will synchronize your last page read if you switch from reading a book on one device to using another, Barnes & Noble lacks that capability yet, though it says it will have it soon.
One more thing: The latest standard-size Kindle allows wireless book purchasing in multiple countries. The Nook does so only in the U.S.
My recommendation on the Nook is to wait, even if you prefer its features to the Kindle's. It's not fully baked yet.
