A year ago we wondered whether Philips’s iRex Reader might be a Kindle killer. The question has resurfaced with a vengeance with the announcement that Best Buy will begin selling the new $399 8.1-inch touchscreen iRex reader.

And Verizon will provide wireless delivery of iRex’s e-books and newspapers in direct competition with Amazon’s Kindle DX (10 inch screen, $499) and and Sony’s Reader Daily Edition (7-inch screen, $399). The New York Times‘s Brad Stone says that “Best Buy is training thousands of its employees in how to talk about and demonstrate devices like the Sony Reader and iRex, and adding a new area to its 1,048 stores to showcase the devices.”

Though the iRex is far less familiar to Americans than it is to Europeans, Stone points out two significant advantages for the Dutch device. The first is that iRex accepts the ePub file format, a universal, open e-book industry standard that allows users to download e-books from a variety of retailers, as opposed to Kindle’s closed, proprietary system that directs buyers to amazon.com and amazon.com only.

The other, and in our opinion far more significant, feature is color. The advantage of a color newspaper and e-book reader is incalculable. Stone thinks that IRex is “on track to have a color version of the device by 2011, something that other vendors, which rely on technology from eInk, a subsidiary of Prime View International of Taiwan, say is years away.”

With Stone citing market research projecting a 4 million unit increase in e-reader sales in 2009, the race for dominance in the marketplace is about to grow cutthroat. Don’t forget that Plastic Logic’s no-name device (which we’ve dubbed the “Teasle”) will soon be sprung on the world. And lurking in the shadows is a possible wild card: the Apple Tablet.

Here’s Stone’s article in full: Best Buy and Verizon Jump Into E-Reader Fray.

Richard Curtis

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.

Farhad Manjoo, Slate‘s technology columnist, has given Sony and other e-reader manufacturers some tips on How To Beat the Kindle. His advice? Likening e-books to music, he urges Kindle’s competitors to “Study everything the iPod’s rivals did. Then do the exact opposite.”

“Lesson No. 1,” says Manjoo: “Beat the Kindle on features, not just price.” He points out that Apple never stopped innovating in design, capacity, size, interface and other features. Rivals figured that if they could do the same only cheaper, they’d catch the giant. But by the time they got up to iPod’s platform, Apple had moved far beyond its earlier versions.

“Lesson No. 2: The service matters more than the device itself,” writes Manjoo. “The iPod isn’t a standalone device. It’s part of a music-delivery ecosystem, the most important feature of which is iTunes.” Kindle’s book-delivery “ecosystem” is Amazon.com and the blogger admits that “It’s here that Kindle’s rivals will find it hard to compete. Amazon is the Internet’s master retailer, and the Kindle’s killer feature is its convenience.”

Surprisingly, Manjoo doesn’t mention one possible competitive feature that might be a gamechanger for e-reading hardware: color. Read Is Color the Real Kindle Killer?

RC

Publishers Weekly‘s Jim Milliot reports that this summer the scales tipped away from desktop and laptop downloads in favor of Kindle. Computer downloads through July melted from 48% of all purchases to 40%, and much of that slack was picked up by the Amazon device. Its market share in the same period rose to 28%. Sony’s lagged at 6% and iPhone a bit more than that, 6.5%. All other devices registered a 19.5% share of the e-book download market. For details and pie charts see Kindle Market Share on the Rise.

What are “all other” devices? PW’s Calvin Reid has prepared an “E-Reader Scorecard” comparing various devices including Kindle, Sony, iRex, iPod, Cool-Er, and the forthcoming Plastic Logic Something-or-Other (in the absence of a name we call it The Teasle). Can’t tell your gadgets without a scorecard? Read Reid’s survey and compare.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.

Like tributaries flowing into a river, four events in the past week have come together to increase the depth and breadth of the e-book business. Each bears watching.

1. Discord over the Google Settlement as the September 4 deadline approaches. After Endeavor William Morris Agency voiced its opposition to the opt-in choice for its client-authors, a number of other opponents entered the fray. It will all come to a head at the end of next week.

2. Sony Debuts Wireless. According to Huffington Post, “Sony Corp. plans to offer an e-book reader with the ability to wirelessly download books, injecting more competition in a small but fast-growing market by adopting a key feature of the rival Kindle from Amazon.com.”
In December Sony will release the device with a price tag of $399. It features a touch screen and will carry books and newspapers via AT&T’s cellular network.

Buried in the story is a Sony announcement that you’ll be able to “borrow” ebooks from libraries and view them on their eReader. That appears to be a feature that other device makers have or have even given much thought to. A system like it has been in use at a number of colleges. After a fixed period of time (in Sony’s case, 21 days) the loan expires and your e-book vaporizes.

3. Barnes & Noble Teams with IREX to offer New Digital Reader. Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly writes that “Barnes & Noble stepped up its efforts to compete with Amazon and the Kindle, announcing plans to partner with Netherlands-based IREX Technologies to offer a new wireless-enabled digital reading device with access to the 700,000 e-book titles available through the newly launched B&N eBookstore.” iRex is a Dutch reading device that has gained some traction in Europe. We hailed it as a Kindle killer a while back, though contenders developed since then are bidding for that title.

One of them is the forthcoming unnamed Plastic Logic reader (we have nicknamed it Teasle until the manufacturer announces the official monicker). And speaking of that, we hope BN.Com will unconfuse us about something. We had the impression that BN had cast its lot exclusively with Plastic Logic. But now it’s announced this relationship with iRex. Can someone out there clarify?

And as for Kindle killers, we’re calling a moratorium on such declarations until Gen Next of e-reading hardware makes itself known. And we’re definitely withholding our blessing until we can read on a full-color screen.

4. Amazon Kindle to launch in Europe next week? Stuff.TV asks whether Kindle is Europe-bound.

The Kindle has proved popular with bookworms in the States, but has failed to launch over here due to licensing issues, leaving British ereaders with a choice between the Sony Reader and the Cool-ER to quench their ebook thirst. However, none of these current offerings have been able to offer the Wi-fi capabilities that is the Kindle’s killer feature, enabling wireless downloads of books and delivery of electronic versions of newspapers and magazines direct to the device. It could be that Amazon is hoping to get the Kindle over here as quickly as possible in order to win over the market before the launch of Sony’s Daily Edition, announced in the States yesterday.

We’ll update you as these four news items unfold.

RC

We recently attempted to explain the new ePub standard and did a pretty good job of simplifying it for the lay audience if we do say so ourselves. However, a reader’s comment suggests we may have oversimplified it. He introduced the concept of “wrapping” ePub in proprietary shell.

What does that mean and why is it important to you?

The ePub (short for “electronic publication”) standard, we explained, was designed to create an open, one-size-fits-all format. We said that Sony was planning to scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of ePub, enabling users to read e-books on any reading device that supports the ePub standard.

Well, yes – and no. Here’s what a correspondent wrote:

“Unfortunately, Sony’s version of ePub, as currently described, will be wrapped in Sony’s DRM, so books downloaded to Sony’s e-reader will not be readable on other devices. ePub does not necessarily mean open, which should be the goal of IDPF and the reading community.“

“DRM” stands for Digital Rights Management, a long way of saying controlled or restricted access to digital content. Proprietary, in other words. Kindle is an example of a proprietary, closed standard.

We referred the question to Michael Gaudet, who frequently unpacks technical complexities for us, and here is what he had to say to our commenter:

What I think you’re asking for is a world with no DRM. While you may see it as unfortunate that Sony isn’t as forward thinking as you’d like, I’m sure Sony and the IDPF are trying to be as realistic as possible in accommodating the ebook market’s suppliers: publishers.

ePub has always been formulated with the anticipation that retailers could wrap it in DRM if they needed to, and many publishers ask for DRM and won’t retail ebooks without it. Each ePub retailer needs to consider how to solve the DRM requirements for publishers and customers, and it’s never going to please everyone.

The biggest publishers who are still actively specifying DRM controls are members of the IDPF and they made these demands in standards meetings for the ePub format, and retailers like Sony and Content Reserve saw what’s coming down the road well in advance of their customers. It would have been suicide for Sony’s ebook store to ignore all the content from publishers who require DRM at this time just because it’s fashionable to bash DRM.

It’s unknown yet whether Sony’s ebookstore ePub implementation will be readable on other devices, but chances are that it can be, depending on the other devices’ software to unlock DRM from multiple vendors. It’s highly likely Adobe’s Digital Editions could support Sony’s ePub in the future, and if that’s possible, then so will other reader platforms that acknowledge ePub.

When customers choose to buy non-DRM books from other retailers that offer them, like Fictionwise, the Sony device is a very welcoming platform for ePub, and I think that’s probably more important than Sony’s store right now. The opportunity exists to read ePubs with or without DRM, and that’s better than where we were a year ago.

Obviously, ePub is not so white, and DRM is not so black. We hope you can live with shades of gray until a true One Size Fits All Standard rules all digital content.

RC