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ReKindling e-books

23.11.07

Amazon's US launch this week of Kindle, its digital reader, has given fresh impetus to the quest to establish a mainstream market in e-books, notes the FT.

"Amazon's development of the Kindle is a sensible long-term defensive measure," it reports. "The Kindle is not an instant design classic, and lacks the single technological breakthrough that marked out Apple's iPhone. It uses electronic ink to make the words look as though they are written on paper, but then so too does the Sony Reader which was launched last year. More of an advance is the ability to use the device to browse 90,000 titles in the Amazon store and make impulse purchases."

In the Guardian, there are suggestions that a dedicated e-book reader will fail when compared with a device such as Apple's iPhone which is multi-faceted.

"While dedicated readers have come and gone, others have tried to shoehorn ebooks onto PCs and mobile phones. Jane Tappuni is one of them. Her company ICUE (i-cue.co.uk) started out publishing ebooks on tiny mobile phone screens. Words would flash on to the screen one after the other in quick succession, in a system advocates call 'flash reading'. As screens evolved, she began offering other formats including a screen ticker and a normal page view. But customers aren't buying as fast as she'd hoped. 'Convergence devices are becoming so easy to read from, and so good,' says a defiant Tappuni. 'I can't see that many people would spend £200 on a dedicated reader.' But clearly, they'll spend big bucks on an iPhone, which could finally give her business what it needs. With Apple opening the platform up to third party developers, she hopes to ship an ICUE reader for it." 

FT

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