Damn! The Cool-er may die before we  learn how to pronounce its name. Martin Daniels on the Bookseller Association blog says the “Cooler reader looks to be another casualty of the squeeze that is inevitable in the ‘lookie likie’ E Ink reader market. They follow iRex in what may be a growing queue of dead technology failures.” Don’t forget Skiff, which dropped out of the e-device market a few weeks ago.

What’s going on?  The front-running e-readers – Kindle, Nook and Sony – all sit on large bodies of content, whereas many of the upstart gadgets have been counting on succeeding strictly on the merits of such competitive qualities as thinner, cheaper, lighter, brighter, more colorful etc. But they also have to beg, borrow or scrounge content. The only outsider holding its own is Apple’s iPad, and one good reason why is that it aggregated a lot of content soon after launching.

So – what went wrong with the Cool-er? Daniels says that it “entered the market in full color with a spectrum of cases, but forgot to make the screen color too. They also misjudged their launch with a stand and presentation more geared to a car show than a book show and their one trick pony was just a color case.”

And of course there was the dumb name. Daniels calls it the “Cooler” but it was introduced as the “Cool-er”.  “Aren’t consumers going to be confused by a b&w reader that sounds like “Col-or”?” we asked (See Another E-Book Reader with a Dumb Name)  “Or is it supposed to suggest the device is cool. Do you pronounce the word like the refrigerated water dispenser commonly found in business offices? Or do you come to a full glottal stop, thus: Cool. Er. No matter how you say it, it’s awkward, cacophonous and meaningless.”

Now it looks like we may never know. Same goes for the Plastic Logic device which, after tormenting us endlessly by withholding the name, finally announced the “Que”.  Is that pronounced “Cue?” “Kwee”? Or is it “Que” as in “Que pasa?”  However you say it, the Que’s release is seriously delayed and it too could be an also-ran in the e-reader sweepstakes. In fact Daniels says “We doubt we will see E Ink readers as we know them today in 2012…The only stay of execution will be a drop to $99 a unit.”

Richard Curtis

NOOK FROM BARNES & NOBLE, $259
SONY READER TOUCH PRS-600, $300, AND DAILY READER, $400
QUE, FROM PLASTIC LOGIC (NO PRICE: DEBUTS JANUARY 7)
IREX DR800SG, $399
COOL-ER, FROM INTEREAD, $249
DISNEY DIGITAL BOOKS, $8.95 A MONTH

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Do you know how to pronounce Scribd? Does it rhyme with “scribed”? Or “fibbed”? I’ve even heard it called “Scrib-dee”.

How about Que, Plastic Logic’s forthcoming e-book reader? Is it pronounced “Kay”? or “Cue”?

Next is the Flepia, Fujitsu’s e-book reader. Is it Fleh-pia or Flee-pia?

Or the UK e-book reader called the Cool-er. As we recently wondered (see Another E-Book Reader with a Dumb Name), is that pronounced “color” (the device screen is black and white by the way)? Or do you pronounce it like the refrigerated water dispenser commonly found in business offices, suggesting it’s cooler than the Kindle? Or maybe you come to a full glottal stop, thus: Cool. Er.

If I were a technology company investing millions of dollars to develop a device or service or product, it would make sense for me to ask a focus group to review it. And to make sure that focus group is stocked with people with dirty minds. Like Charles Curtis’s.

Charles Curtis believes there is money to be made helping corporations avoid selecting embarrassing names for their products. He would call his service “Double Entendre Consulting”. “The concept,” he explains, “is this: say you’re a startup with a company name, logo, slogan but you’re nervous that there’s something hidden in it that will make you a laughingstock. So you pay my company a fee and I, along with my fellow gross-minded colleagues, will review your selections and tell you if they’re clean or if they will become fodder for viral hilarity on the Internet.”

For example? “If Kids Exchange had hired us, we would have informed them that their URL, kidsexchange.net, spelled out something very different from what they intended. Same goes for an outfit called Who Represents? Their URL is Whorepresents.com.

“This idea came up in college when I used to frequent a fast food joint that prided itself on making great salads. Unfortunately, their slogan was, ‘The Original Salad Tossers’. If you don’t understand why that’s so hilarious, click here. When I went back there years later, the slogan on their napkins had changed, so perhaps someone had informed them that sickos such as myself were rolling on the floor every time we mentioned their slogan. And teabagging? The Republicans, should have consulted me before they began advocating that practice. Click here to learn why.”

Full disclosure Number 1: I sired this person. Full disclosure #2: if he does go into the double entendre business I intend to become a serious investor, because I think there’s a fortune to be made in exposing dumb names.

And that brings us to The Nook.

Charles does not mention what he would have said to Barnes & Noble had they consulted with him about The Nook, BN.Com’s newly minted and named e-book reader. But he might consider employing a blogger named Charissa, who wrote the following Open Letter to Barnes & Noble:

Dear Barnes & Noble,

What were you thinking?

Who on earth thought it would be a good idea to name you new E-Reader device the nook? I mean, really? Do you know anything about pop culture and slang from the last few decades? I would love to know what kind of focus groups you used to demo the name and marketing, or did you use focus groups at all? Because I don’t know who wouldn’t have told you this is a bad idea.

And did you even give a thought to what your booksellers are going to have to endure, answering questions about the nook(ie)? Not to mention all the jokes they’re going to be subject to. Trust me, there is an endless supply of nook jokes out there, from the innocent “nook, nook” jokes to more suggestive humor.

Not to mention the fact that within less than 24 hours of the nook’s announcement, some anonymous B&N employees have already begun re-writing Limp Bizkit’s “Nookie” in honor of the nook. Do you realize how obnoxious it is to have the words, “And you can take you Kindle and stick it up your…” stuck in your head all day long?

And it’s really bad that the device itself doesn’t even come out until the end of November and I’m already having trouble using the name in a sentence with a straight face. We still have more than a month of nook jokes to go.

I realize it’s too late to change the name now, but I really hope next time you’re a little more careful when selecting the name of something as monumental to the company as this device apparently is.

Sincerely,
A Concerned Citizen

PS – If you were to, say, give out free nooks to all your employees in an effort to encourage them to familiarize themselves with the device for customer questions, then I would be more than willing to forgive you for this minor naming indiscretion.

We wish the best of success to the makers of the Flepia, Que, Cool-er and Nook. They should be aware, though, that had they hired Double Entendre Consulting they might have avoided becoming, in the words of W. S. Gilbert, “a source of innocent merriment.”

Richard Curtis, President of E-Reads (which is pronounced “Ee-Reeds”, not “Eh-Reds”)

Breathe easy, Kindle, the Cool-er is not your killer. It might not even give you a bloody nose.

A review by David Pogue in the New York Times found a handful of redeeming features, but overall the device seems to exemplify what can go wrong when technologists don’t think things through, don’t perform adequate field testing and market analysis, and rush products to market before they’re viable. “Neil Jones, inventor and chief executive of Cool-er’s parent company Interead, says the device went from original idea to finished product in only four and a half months,” Pogue reports. “Unfortunately, it shows. The hardware and software design are, to put it kindly, unrefined.”

As we recently wrote, the Cool-er has lots of promise and some genuinely competitive features. It’s thinner than the Kindle and about two thirds the price. Its casing comes in a number of attractive colors as opposed to Sony’s battleship gray or Kindle’s bed-linen beige. But note: the casing is in color, but the screen is black and white, and it’s not backlit.

The Cool-er can store 700 books; with a memory card the number soars to 2800. If you get stranded on a desert island, that’s over fifty years of literary companionship at the rate of one book a week. Cool-er’s battery is advertised as holding its charge for 8000 page turns, or about 25 average length books. And, unlike the Kindle, you can remove the Cool-er’s battery; five bucks will buy you a new one.

Pogue notes some other positives:

• The Cool-er has its own online store, stocked with 275,000 titles
• The Cool-er enables you to read on your Mac as well as a PC
• You can share a Cool-er book you’ve bought with four other people. e it to a library

So far so good, right? Now Pogue turns to the not-so-hot aspects. Among them:

• The Cool-er ‘s plastic frame “feels hollow and insubstantial; the plastic literally creaks when you press the buttons, which doesn’t inspire particular confidence”
• The click-wheel “is actually four compass-point buttons (not a true dial)” and they’re “stiff and balky.”
• There’s a several-second lag for page turns, “not an ideal setup for immersive reading.”
• “The four tiny white buttons on the left edge are unlabeled except for cryptic, molded indentations” and even after decrypting their purpose, navigation seems random and arbitrary (including one to play sudoku!).
• Type-size changes require “16 key presses, each requiring about 20 pounds of force.”
• The Cool-er requires you to buy books on your Mac or PC, then transfer them to the reader via a U.S.B. connection.
• “You can drag your own PDF or text files onto the reader…, but success is hit-or-miss. Some of my PDF files wouldn’t open; one froze the machine; the rest often appear with such tiny type that you’d need a microscope to read them. (You can’t enlarge them.)”
• The Cool-er has no audio feature.
• “There’s no built-in dictionary. Because it has no keyboard, it doesn’t permit you to make annotations or search for bits of text.”
• The Cool-er bookstore “has a lot of holes. No Harry Potter, no John Grisham, not even Freakonomics. Of 15 of the top New York Times best sellers, the Cool-er store has only 9, costing $16 to $23. The Kindle store, by contrast, has all 15 — for $10 each.

And of course, there’s the dumb name. In our original posting about the device, we wrote:

Aren’t consumers going to be confused by a b&w reader that sounds like “Col-or”? Or is it supposed to suggest the device is cool? Do you pronounce the word like the refrigerated water dispenser commonly found in business offices? Or do you come to a full glottal stop, thus: Cool. Er. No matter how you say it, it’s awkward, cacophonous and meaningless.

Well, I take “meaningless” back. Pogue says “The name Cool-er comes from “Cool E-book Reader.” Well, okay, I guess. But wouldn’t it more correctly be “Cool-Ebr”?

“So no,” Pogue concludes, “you shouldn’t buy this 1.0 effort— but you should root for successors. The ideals that inspired the Cool-er are important and worth fighting for…”

You can read his complete analysis in Don’t Quit That Kindle Just Yet.

RC

We realize that crazy names for digital startups are fashionable. The reasoning is that a weird word sticks in your memory and if it catches on, the recognition factor can be priceless. Google, anyone?

On the other hand, funky names can be a disadvantage if they are also disagreeable or hard to pronounce, particularly if you’ve created a product that you are hoping will supplant the sonorous and aptly named Kindle. That’s why, for example, we’re skeptical that the world is going to beat a path to a gadget called the Flepia. Discussing color e-book readers we recently wrote:

It’s hard to take an e-book named Flepia seriously. First of all, no one knows if it’s Fleh-pia or Flee-pia (it’s Fleh, I’m reliably told). Second of all, “Flepia” sounds like one of those junk fishes hauled up with a tuna catch.

The Flepia is made by Fujitsu, and if anything would induce us to utter the word “Flepia” aloud at the sales counter of an electronics store it’s the fact that it’s the first full-color commercial e-book reader. But it would still be embarrassing.

Another Japanese e-book reader named by a marketing genius with a tin ear is Panasonic’s WordsGear. It too is in living color, and comes in at half of the intimidating $1000 price of the Flepia. But it’s hard to see myself reading a book on something called a WordsGear.

The Japanese don’t have a monopoly on inept nomenclature for e-book readers. From a UK outfit called Interead comes the Cool-er. It boasts a number of advantages over the competition, among them price (at $250, it’s a third cheaper than Kindle and Sony) and weight. “The Cool-er weighs 5.6 ounces – compared to 10 oz of the Sony Reader and 10.2 oz of the Amazon Kindle 2,” writes Priya Ganapati for Wired.com’s Engadget. “That means the Cool-er is nearly 40 percent lighter than its biggest competitors.”

It also comes in eight colors. But does that make it a color reader? No, just the frames are colored. The text is good old black and white E-ink. Which brings us to the name. Aren’t consumers going to be confused by a b&w reader that sounds like “Col-or”? Or is it supposed to suggest the device is cool. Do you pronounce the word like the refrigerated water dispenser commonly found in business offices? Or do you come to a full glottal stop, thus: Cool. Er. No matter how you say it, it’s awkward, cacophonous and meaningless.

The dark horse in the Dumb Name Derby is the e-reader developed by Plastic Logic. Despite its imminent release it still doesn’t have a name. Because of its thin, flexible design – you can roll it up like a scroll – it is a keenly anticipated device. But what will it be named?

One hopes that the company’s management will learn from the unfortunates described here and give us a name we can utter joyously and proudly. Or how about a name we can utter at all.

RC