By Paul Lemon

As the proud owner of the now defunct Rocket e-book I am watching the current half cocked e-book bunfight with interest. I even have one of those Google Alerts watching the net with the alertness of a terrier with the smell of a rat on the wind. Unfortunately it keeps on retrieving US data. I mean how explicit does one have to be? "kindle, uk". That should be enough for a tight search no? As it is, I only came across this blog via one of its 'finds' out on the Quill blog in Ontario. This tells me even the Google search is not bothering looking for Kindle on UK sites, as it is so far off the radar as to be over the horizon. With the death of the Rockets e-book library my hefty friend is now only fed on occasion from the Gutenberg e-book site. The last was the text of Cranford. I did download a few paid-for books from a US bookseller way back when in 2000. Then the newer offerings extended from technical treatises through to some of the most execrable fantasy writing not ever committed to paper. Now looking at the e-book market, in terms of content at least, things are looking up. However the devices seem to have gone back a step. The much heralded 'e-ink' looks wonderful on the static page but move forward or back a page and you get the hideous 'black flash'. The most expensive of the new readers, the Iliad, has only recently had its hardware speeded up to tolerable levels I believe. While I was looking seriously at investing in one a few months back, I was planning on timing my blinking to match the turn of the page! Will I still buy a Kindle when it comes out? Of course I will, even if it does look rather hideous. Fingers crossed that Apple produce something gorgeous that does the same thing. Steve Jobs, Apple's visionary CEO, recently dammed the Kindle saying that hardly anyone in the US actually reads anymore. The pundits says that this means he already has a Kindle beater in hand. For now my old Rocket may be a mite heavy but at least I can read it in bed at night unlike the e-ink readers. There are 12 levels of brightness to choose from. OK, so I live in fear of the battery failing on me one day. I can then always go back to the real thing, which I reckon will outlive all the technology for at least as long I am alive, and maybe, hopefully, a lot longer.

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By David (aka: Bleep and Booster)

The iPod and the music industry seem to be being used as the benchmarks for e-books. Which at first glance makes sense. However, who do you know who has 100% downloaded music on their iPod? Figures suggest that 90% of music on music players is uploaded from the consumers existing music collection. There were 110 Million iPods sold by September 2007 so obviously that 10% of downloaded music impacted heavily on the music industry when spread over that number of iPods, it is delusional to suggest that an e-reader will shift anything remotely like that number for a long time. Those kinds of numbers suggest that the iPod, or digital music players in general fulfilled a need, a hunger that people had for just such a device. Is there a 'hunger' for an e-reader? On my 'ancient' 30GB iPod just over 2% of the 4950 tracks are downloaded. Music players solved the problem of taking your record collection with you wherever you go. To date, you cannot upload the content of your bookshelves, therefore the device has limited use. In light of this, I believe e-readers will only work on a large scale if the device itself is very cheap. Devices that can cope with pdfs, displaying them nicely will stand a better chance of surviving as they can be used to view online magazines and documents. I have no doubt that e-books will take off at some point, but I think the 'breakthrough' device will need to be cheap for people to feel the value of the e-book. You buy an album £6-8 on iTunes, you listen to it again and again. You put your iPod on shuffle and it mixes in with all your other albums, you're carrying around your own radio show. You highlight your favourites and they come up more often. With text it's going to be very, very different and the perceived value for the reader is going to be very, very different too.

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By Little Egret

The comments that follow are the way the world is. You can make money from ebooks but even Jim Baen doesn't get a major revenue stream from them and only those who buy more than a score of books a year are going to get a dedicated e-book reader. so "dominant revenue stream" is quite unlikely even if reader hardware was priced as low a pocket calculators or built in to every mobile phone. "part of our everyday lives", same same - how many buy 1 book a week and how many complaints are there about the reductions in public library purchases ? " But I figure that if I was making the kind of investment these publishers are planning on making, I'd like to know the audience size."

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