When people talk about e-books in color, what exactly do they mean?  Is it that the device’s frame comes in rainbow colors (like the now-defunct Cool-er) while the screen remains black and white e-ink?  Or do they mean there is a color strip at the bottom of a black and white screen  – The Nook – displaying colorful thumbnails of book covers?

Or is it that the black print will be replaced by yellow or green or blue or red ink and the  background will be red or blue or green or yellow?

That question isn’t answered, or even really raised, in an article by Anne Eisenberg in the New York Times updating us on developments in color e-books  Is the question so big no one knows how to articulate it?  Or is it such a fundamental assumption that we don’t need to articulate it at all?

You would think that with some 11 million boringly monochromatic e-book readers sold this year and 15 million projected for 2011, the industry would feel that black and white ain’t broken and there’s no need to fix it. And we’re not aware of any plans afoot for major players like Amazon/Kindle and Barnes & Noble/Nook to introduce color. But “The popularity of the Apple iPad, on which people can read books, surf the Internet, watch videos and enjoy thousands of apps — all in full color — has shaken up the market,” writes Eisenberg.

Transforming e-readers from b&w to color is far from a mere wave of a wand.  The beauty of e-ink is its minimal power demands, and though Kindles, Sonys and Nooks can’t be read in the dark without a lamp, neither do they suck electric juice like backlit devices (the iPad) with LCD screens.  And there are other advantages to boring old e-ink. It reduces the weight of e-readers, and reduces blinding glare in strong sunlight.

But this still begs the question, which we repeat: do people want to read colored words on colored backgrounds?  Did you say no?  Are you sure?  Is it that long since you read a children’s book?

We grow up reading colored words on colored backgrounds.  We may feel we “graduate” to black and white when we grow up but how locked into b&w are we, really?  Modern readers are conditioned to read blue ink for Internet links, and red ink for editorial comments on manuscripts and legal documents.  Are we ready for a steady diet of colored words?

You may find out as the next generation of e-book screen technology slouches in your direction.  Read about it in Reading E-Books in All the Colors of the Rainbow.

Richard Curtis

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

No Contest.

That’s the judgment rendered by technology maven David Pogue in his New York Times column evaluating the latest version of Kindle and comparing it to rivals iPad, Nook and Sony. Here’s his pronunciamento: “Certain facts are unassailable: that the new Kindle offers the best E Ink screen, the fastest page turns, the smallest, lightest, thinnest body and the lowest price tag of any e-reader. It’s also the most refined and comfortable.”

Following is a thumbnail sketch of Pogue’s take on Kindle 3 (in his own words):

• The smallness comes in the form of a 21 percent reduction in the dimensions from the previous Kindle…Yet the screen has the same six-inch diagonal measurements as always because they shaved away a lot of that empty beige (or now dark gray) plastic margin…The background gray is a few shades lighter than on any other reader, producing much better contrast behind the black text.
• The Kindle is almost ridiculously lightweight; at 8.5 ounces, it’s a third the weight of the iPad. That’s a big deal for a machine that you want to hold in your hands for hours.
• Then there is the $140 price. That’s for the model with Wi-Fi — a feature new to the Kindle that plays catch-up to the Barnes & Noble Nook…Quite a tumble from the Kindle’s original $400 price, and a tiny sliver of what you would pay for an iPad ($500 and way, way up).
• The Kindle’s catalog of 630,000 current books is 10 times the size of Apple’s.
• E Ink is great for battery life. (Amazon says that on the new Kindle, if you turn off the wireless features, you can read for a month on a single charge.)
• The new Kindle reduces the page-turn wait to well under a second. It’s the fastest page-turner among e-readers.
• The new Kindle’s nonremovable storage now holds twice as many books: 3,500 of them.
• The tiny joystick has been replaced by cellphone-like four-way control buttons, and the page-turn Forward and Back buttons, which flank both edges, are silent now, for the benefit of sleeping spouses. And the new Kindle handles PDF documents much better now; you can even add notes to them and magnify them.

Are there flaws in Kindle 3? Yes. Problems? Some. Invidious comparisons to competitive devices? Sure.  Learn what they are in New Kindle Leaves Rivals Farther Back

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.

iPad is good for a lot of things but it could really screw up your sleep. The head of the UCLA Sleep Disorders Center says that the luminescence inhibits the production of melatonin in the brain.  Melatonin is a key chemical in sending you drifting off to beddy-bye.

Bill Ray, reporting on the effects of e-reading on vision (Don’t try to sleep with your iPad, doctor warns), says that e-ink screens like Kindle, Sony and Nook do not have that melatonin-inhibiting glare, but users may develop another problem. “Apparently the limited contrast of e-ink screens can cause eye-strain, but at least those with strained eyes are well rested.”

Ray also reminds us that if you do doze off while reading, it’s cheaper to drop a printed book on the floor than a device you paid hundreds of dollars for.

Richard Curtis

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

E-book sales are growing exponentially.  Print book sales are flat.  So -  how long will it take for e-books to punch through the print books envelope?

Before you raise your hand, work this into your calculations: e-book sales are on track to top $400 million in 2010.  The print book business is estimated at $24 billion. That’s 60x e-book revenues.

That equation has not daunted Sony, manufacturer of Kindle’s rival e-book reader, from projecting that in five years E will surpass P, according to Shane Richmond, Head of Technology for Telegraph.co.uk. Richmond writes that the president of Sony’s digital reading business division actually cut his projection from ten years to five after observing that “The same patterns that Sony had seen in the digitization of music and photography are now being repeated in the books market.”

Full article here.

Richard Curtis

In 2001 Bill Gates categorically declared that within five years tablets “will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.” It’s three years since his prediction expired, and looking back it seems preposterously quixotic. So here’s a preposterously quixotic update of our own on Gates’s prophecy: within five years tablets will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.

The reason, in one word: Education. As we wrote in 2008, the prize for the right student-friendly portable e-book is worth billions, and current models of Kindle, Sony Reader and iRex are simply inadequate for textbooks, illustrated books, schoolwork and homework. Even the much ballyhooed Plastic Logic Something or Other (we’ve dubbed it the “Teasle”) isn’t shaping up to handle tablet-sized tasks. For one thing, none of these gadgets is in color.

It appears, however, that Microsoft is ready to step into the ring for the Tablet PC Sweepstakes Round #2 in the form of something called the Courier. According to Gizmodo and PC World, this tablet has “two 7-inch, presumably color, touchmicrosoft courier tabletscreens that use a combination of multitouch and stylus inputs. From what we’ve seen so far, Courier does not have any kind of keyboard — virtual or physical — and depends completely on handwriting recognition software for entering text. Tech specs are scarce, but Courier would have Wi-Fi connectivity and a camera.”

And Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance, in Just a Touch Away, the Elusive Tablet PC published in the New York Times, report that “In June, Archos, a French consumer electronics company, began selling a small touch-screen tablet running Google’s Android software. Later this month, it will introduce another tablet that runs on Microsoft’s Windows 7, which has built-in support for touch screens.”

The iPhone? Steve Jobs has said “Never” to a tablet-sized iPhone. That could actually mean Never, Maybe Never, or Tomorrow Afternoon. The latest rumor places Apple’s rollout of a $700 tablet at early next year.

There are certainly hurdles to be overcome. The absence of a keyboard, even a virtual one, is a big drawback for any computer designed for classroom use. And touchscreens are fun but they can slow reactivity to a crawl. The ultimate in touchscreen tech, Microsoft Surface, is not ready for tablet prime time but if you’d like to see a mindblowing preview, visit the Surface website and be tantalized. Nevertheless, the time is right for Bill Gates’s prediction to come true. Okay, so he’s a few years late. Who of us has not been a few years late with something!

The key to successful prophecy is Don’t Be Too Specific. But we stand by our prognostication: five years from now there’ll be a tablet under every student’s arm.

Richard Curtis

I’ve made a rule for myself to ignore an unfamiliar phrase the first couple of times I hear it, but if I hear it a third time I pay attention. If you haven’t heard the term “ePub” up to now, you’re going to do so with increasing frequency. So maybe you’d better listen up.

If you understand nothing else about e-book readers, at least understand this: they operate either on a closed standard or an open one. If closed, you can read an e-book only on that device. If open, you can read it interchangeably on many devices. Ideally, you should be able to read it on any device.

Music lovers know all about closed systems from Apple’s iTunes store, created a few years ago. You could not transfer music from your iPod to non-Apple players.

The most prominent example of an e-reader with a closed standard is Amazon’s Kindle. You simply can’t download a Kindle title into your cellphone or PDA. Amazon designed its product to keep retail e-book sales inside the Amazon family, and so far the strategy has been a big success. Arguably, however, the success can be attributed to Kindle being the first big commercial e-book reader, and by far the most actively promoted and publicized. Many Kindle owners swear by the device, but with competition mounting from a number of manufacturers and retailers, the next generation of consumers will have more choices. Some of the e-book readers will have a more open format.

Another example of a closed, or proprietary, device is the Sony e-Reader. However, an announcement by Sony of its intention to switch to an open standard will add momentum to the forces arrayed against Kindle. The name of that open standard is ePub. “By the end of the year,” writes Brad Stone of the New York Times, Sony “will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard created by a group including publishers like Random House and HarperCollins.”

The ePub (short for “electronic publication”) standard was developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum. IDPF is a trade organization of e-book manufacturers, retailers, software developers and publishers that from the dawn of the industry – 1998 – has been working to create an open, one-size-fits-all format. Think of it as the e-book equivalent of the standard 33 1/3 rpm established for long-playing phonograph records and 45 rpm for singles. “Sony will also scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied,” writes Stone.

Once Sony switches over to ePub, you’ll be able to read an e-book on any reading device that supports the ePub standard. As Stone points out, the battle that will take place around the ePub flag will involve a host of giants, not the least of which is Apple. So, as you shop for your next (or first) e-book reader it is definitely in your best interests to remember the word “ePub”.

Read Brad Stone’s Sony Plans to Adopt Common Format for E-Books.

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.

Danielle Belopotosky is a dedicated “real-book person” but was prepared to keep an open mind as she road-tested the Kindle 2, a variety of Sony readers and some iPhone nouvellement arriveés like the Stanza and Shortcovers. The net result is that she’s still a dedicated real-book person, but now maybe a little less so. “I’ve come around on my opposition to e-book. Somewhat,” she grudgingly admits in her New York Times e-book survey.

Not surprisingly she devotes most of her attention to the Kindle 2 and echoes many of the positive reviews we recently assembled including our own. But she does have some issues:

The new Kindle is thinner than the original and has a sharper screen with more shades of gray, producing easy-to-read, crisp text in any light. But while the Kindle is nice to look at, it is a pain to navigate. There’s a five-way joystick that you can use to maneuver through menus, but it’s stiff and tough to master. Would a touch screen be too much to ask?

The keyboard lets you add notes to text, but no one is going to want to write a novel of their own using its small plasticky buttons. Also, Amazon’s page numbering system is ridiculous: Instead of “page 23,” you get data such as “location 47-82” and “2%” along the bottom of the screen. After using the Kindle for a week, I still don’t know what all that means.

She likes many things about Sony’s PRS-700, especially its touch screen, virtual keyboard, easy page numbering and access to many book websites and digital libraries. Some other functions, especially the annoying difficulties of downloading e-books via cable instead of wirelessly as in the Kindle, got lower marks from Belopotosky.

Check out A Walk Through a Crop of Readers and note what she has to say about the hot-off-the-press Shortcovers.

Despite increased respect for e-books Belopotosky will stand pat with book-books “unless Amazon comes out with a special ‘book scented’ Kindle.” Don’t laugh: if Amazon can make a book talk, they can make it smell.

RC

Brian Fichter of coolhunting.com held a prototype of Plastic Logic’s e-reader in his hands at New York’s Tools of Change for Publishing Conference and declared he was “more than impressed.” This is the device we wrote about in September.

Fichter’s reservations are all about shape and color and feel (too beige, corners not rounded to his satisfaction, etc.), but these are cavils compared to the catalogue of advantages he lists, features that are going to give Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s eReader some stiff competition when the, um, Whatsit is released. That’s not the name for it, but either PL is guarding it like the crown jewels or doesn’t have a clue what to call it. We’ll have to wait about year to know and to hold the device in our own hands. But for a preview check out the video of a demo at the Consumer Electronics Show, along with Fichter’s take on the device. Here’s an excerpt

With a form factor equivalent to that of a legal-size pad of paper, though coming in at half the thickness and weighing under 16 ounces, it’s easy to see the reader’s instant appeal. Compatibility with document formats like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDFs, in addition to newspapers, periodicals and books, means that users will no longer need to stuff carry-ons or briefcases full of papers when traveling. The reader has the capacity to store thousands of documents, all of which can be synced wirelessly or with wired access. Publishing partners already include fictionwise, the Financial Times, Ingram Digital and USA Today.

Fichter refers to the Plastic Logic device as a possible “Kindle Killer” but there’s an evil twin lurking in E-Book World, the iRex Reader 1000 about which we wrote last fall; it too was dubbed a potential Kindle Killer. Sounds like there’s a hit-team of assassins looking to whack Kindle, but for now the device is planted smugly on its throne guarded by a fierce contingent of amazons captained by Jeff Bezos.

RC

Whenever people talk about e-book reading devices they use the iPod as the metaphor for a game-changing innovation. But Matt Buchanan, blogging on the Gizmodo website, reminds us that the original iPod was no game-changer by any stretch of the imagination. “The first iPods didn’t overturn any market. They were just marginally better than their competitors, but they were limited to Mac users only, had mechanical scroll wheels and were easily damaged.”

Buchanan’s point is that if the Kindle actually does turn out to be the “iPod of books”, it may take a while – and a lot of upgrades and refinements – before it blows away the competition and becomes the standard by which all other devices are measured.

And Buchanan doesn’t think that either Kindle or the Sony eReader is there yet. His quarrel is with screen display: “As of now, there are two display camps – electronic paper and LCD – and both have far too many compromises at the moment to be adequate for a reading revolution.”

Does he see any candidates emerging? He likes what Plastic Logic is producing: “A perfectly-sized flexible plastic touchscreen that’s basically all E-Ink display, plus Wi-Fi.” (For a rerfresher on Plastic Logic’s extraordinary no-name entry into the e-reader sweepstakes, click here.) But even the Plastic Logic approach has issues, Buchanan goes on to say. He also cites a new company, Pixel Qi, which is “reinventing the LCD”. An executive he talked to “says that Pixel Qi’s displays are actually more readable than e-paper, with “excellent reflectance, high resolution for text, sunlight readability” – just as easy on the eyes when the backlighting is turned off, but with the key advantages of full color and fast refresh, for pages that update as fast as video.”

Read Why There Isn’t a Perfect Ebook Reader. Kindle and Sony have a very strong position in the race to be the iPod of books, but there’s still room for new contenders and, as so often happens in technology, the winner could come from a radically different source than any in the current landscape. Such as the clothing people that designed the iPod bikini pictured here. Touch where indicated to advance to your favorite tune.

RC