Digital Media

First the Nook (pictured), now the MediaBook?

(Credit: Barnes & Noble)

The question is, who isn't getting in on the e-book reader action these days? Less than two weeks after we met Barnes & Nobles' Nook and just a few days after hearing of tire maker Bridgestone's plans for a flexible e-reader, our friends at Crave UK alerted us that Creative may be hopping on the e-reader bandwagon as well.

Creative fan site EpiZenter.net (so named for Creative's family of popular Zen MP3 players) reports that the company showed off a working model of its first e-book reader, tentatively named the MediaBook, at its annual general meeting Thursday in Singapore. The device reportedly has a touch screen, text-to-speech function, and an SD memory card slot. It will run on Creative's Zii System-On-Chip technology and will be Internet-enabled.

At the meeting, Willie Png, Creative's vice president of strategic business, described Amazon's Kindle as "just another electronic device which displays books in text" (snap!), according to EpiZenter.net, and said Creative's e-reader will harness "videos, pictures, text, and services in one device that supports a media-rich experience." Color Creative ready to join the ever-tightening race to produce that proverbial "Kindle killer."

Creative reportedly is talking to 10 international and local publishers to provide content for the MediaBook, with fiction, newspaper, magazines, education materials, and textbooks all slotted for the device. Singapore Press Holdings, which publishes 17 newspapers and more than 100 magazines, could be one local content provider, saying it is exploring with Creative how to provide a variety of multimedia content, including videos and radio programs, for the device.

No word yet on pricing and availability, but we'll fill you in as soon as we hear.

The tech industry buzzes a lot about e-book readers. But how widely are they actually used?

Among 1,529 consumers who responded to a July 2009 questionnaire from research firm In-Stat, only 5.8 percent currently own an e-book reader. And only 11 percent of those questioned said they planned to buy one in the next 12 months, according to the In-Stat report released this week.

Those low results may be even more significant given that In-Stat's survey audience consisted of high-end consumers who typically adopt new technology earlier than the general public.

Another study released last week by Forrester discovered that consumers find e-book readers much too expensive. Extrapolating from the 4,706 U.S. consumers questioned, Forrester found that almost 65 percent of U.S. adults online would consider a price of $98 or less too expensive for an e-book reader but would still purchase one.

Fewer than 20 percent said $99 to $148 was too pricey for a reader though they would still buy one, while 14 percent said the same about readers in the $149 to $198 range.

(Credit: Forrester Research)

Those results are significant in a market where Amazon's least expensive Kindle sells for $299, even after a recent price cut, and Sony's less-pricey Pocket edition Reader sells for $199.

In-Stat's survey found a greater tolerance for high prices. Among its audience, 40 percent of potential buyers would pay $200 to $299 for a reader, 29 percent would pay $100 to $199, and 13.6 percent would pay less than $100.

(Credit: In-Stat)

Among current users of e-book readers, In-Stat found the number one requested feature is e-mail. Potential buyers cited better battery life and Internet connectivity as the two most important factors in persuading them to buy a reader.

Of the number of e-book users questioned in the In-Stat survey, more than 58 percent own the Amazon Kindle, while 9 percent use Sony's Reader. Around 45.5 percent of them spend between $9 and $20 a month on e-books.

In its report, Forrester predicted that 2 million U.S. consumers will buy an e-reader this year, in addition to the 1 million who bought one in 2008.

Forrester's blog dissected the meaning of its survey: "The maximum addressable market for eReaders as they are currently priced is substantial--but to reach the largest market possible, the prices will need to come way down. And even then, eReaders are never going to be as big a market as MP3 players, which 110 million US consumers own."

Another Amazon Kindle competitor has unveiled its plans for the future. And like Plastic Logic's e-reader, the device will feature Barnes & Noble's e-book store.

The Kindle has even more competitors.

(Credit: Amazon)

When Irex Technologies unveils its consumer e-reader later this year, it will include Barnes & Noble's e-books, Irex said in a statement Monday.

Barnes & Noble's store currently features more than 750,000 titles, and it expects that library of available titles to increase to more than one million within the next year. The full library will be available for download on Irex's e-reader.

That news followed a report earlier this month that Irex's new e-reader will sport an 8.1-inch touch screen and 3G wireless connectivity. The device's touch screen will be controlled with a stylus instead of a user's fingers.

(Credit: Plastic Logic)

So far, Amazon's Kindle has been in a safe position as one of the dominant electronic readers on the market. However, this may be changing because its rival, the Plastic Logic e-Reader, has been busy gaining prelaunch partners.

Plastic Logic, the start-up maker of the possible Kindle "killer" e-reader, announced Thursday that Olive Software will be a key service provider and partner for the Plastic Logic Publishers Program. The partnership means the two companies will develop content-publishing solutions for newspapers, magazines, and Web content providers, as well as other publishers that distribute their content via Plastic Logic's e-reader.

Olive is a prominent digital publishing company that produces hundreds of newspapers and magazine titles across multiple platforms--including electronic reading devices, smartphones, browsers, and Internet-enabled TV.

Plastic Logic e-reader photos

The Plastic Logic e-reader is an electronic reader designed specifically for mobile users. The device will be about the size of an 8.5-inch by 11-inch pad of paper and weighs less than most magazines. It seems to be an ultrathin, simple, and strong device, gauging from a recent demo.

Differentiating the new e-reader from the Kindle is the fact that it supports both 3G and Wi-Fi. This means you can download new content via wireless on the go, and from your home and office Wi-Fi networks. In addition, apart from published contents, the Plastic Logic e-reader supports popular document formats, including PDF, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents.

Recently, Plastic Logic also hooked up with Barnes & Noble and announced that it will use AT&T's 3G network.

The Plastic Logic Reader is due to launch early next year. For now, it's still unclear how much it will cost.

As it has for most of the past decade, Barnes & Noble is playing catchup to Amazon. Barnes, the nation's largest brick-and-mortar bookseller said Monday that it has launched its own digital-book store.

Plastic Logic's prototype e-book reader

(Credit: Plastic Logic Limited)

The Barnes & Noble eBookstore will enable customers to read the service's digital books on an array of different platforms, including the iPhone, the iPod Touch and BlackBerry smartphones, the company said in a statement.

In addition, Barnes & Noble will be the exclusive digital-book supplier for the upcoming Plastic Logic eReader, which hopes one day to be a competitor of Amazon's Kindle, by far the nation's most popular e-book reader.

But anyone wishing to buy Barnes & Noble's e-books on Plastic Logic's device has got some waiting to do. The device is not scheduled to go on sale until next year.

Amazon has already completed an upgrade of the Kindle.

Still, Barnes & Noble has finally returned to the e-book game in a big way and there's plenty the chain can do to cross market the books from within its more than 700 brick-and-mortar locations.

Barnes & Noble first got into e-books after they sparked a flurry of excitement in 2000 when best-selling author Stephen King experimented with the format. E-books failed to catch with the public, however, largely because there wasn't an easy or useful way to access them. The Kindle helped to change that.

Barnes & Noble ended it's first attempt at selling digital books in September 2003.

Two companies that teamed up to create displays for the Sony Reader and Amazon.com Kindle e-book readers are officially joining forces.

Taiwain-based Prime View International (PVI), a leading display maker, said Monday it plans to acquire e-paper manufacturer E Ink for $215 million.

PVI creates displays for digital devices, including cameras, TVs, GPS systems, and e-readers. The company has its own e-paper unit and is a top worldwide supplier of flexible display panels. Cambridge, Mass.-based E Ink makes digital ink technology that goes into cell phones, e-readers, and other portable devices.

PVI and E Ink have already had a relationship. PVI has been one of E Ink's biggest customers, having switched from LCDs to electronic ink for its display panels. Electronic ink offers higher resolution and chews up less power than traditional LCD panels. The two worked together to create the displays for Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader.

The combined company hopes to capitalize on the growing e-reader market.

"Combining E Ink and PVI creates a single public company that is dedicated to electronic paper," said Russ Wilcox, E Ink's co-founder, president, and CEO. "With a common ownership structure, we can get closer to customers around the world, streamline the supply chain, and speed up new product development."

The surging demand for e-paper is likely to continue. A recent report from Forrester Research predicts a boom in e-readers in the U.S. over the next few years. A report from market researcher In-Stat predicts that worldwide e-reader shipments will jump to 30 million by 2013.

Since its inception in 1997, E Ink has depended on cash infusions from other companies to stay afloat and keep growing, including from Intel, Motorola, and Philips. Over the years, E Ink has received $150 million in financing, with its investors waiting for the e-book market to pay off.

With its acquisition by PVI, E Ink may finally have the resources to take bigger strides. Referring to PCI, Wilcox said, "They've been at it for years, they feel the growth, and they've decided to focus their company on electronic paper. With their resources, we're going to be able to accelerate our research and development and expand capacity more quickly."

The acquisition is subject to approval by shareholders of both companies. Under the plan, E Ink will become a wholly owned subsidiary of PVI, keep its headquarters and staff in Cambridge, and expand its research and development on e-paper. E Ink also plans to add another 20 workers to its 120-member staff.

Companies are likely to challenge the Amazon Kindle by unveiling cheaper, more versatile e-readers, moving beyond books, and striking better deals with publishers, according to a report released Monday by Forrester Research.

"Amazon.com, leveraging its position as a dominant book retailer, has catalyzed the market for eBooks, but that's just the beginning of the eReader revolution," writes Forrester media and technology analyst Sarah Rotman Epps in the report. "Competitors will attack Amazon's market position by launching new features, expanding content beyond books, dominating markets outside the U.S., reducing costs, and improving relationships with publishers."

The eReader market has been hot, notes the report, thanks to consumers who are hungry for portable and convenient media devices. Around 14.9 million U.S. households regularly buy books online. Among that group, 48 percent earn more than $70,000 a year and spend $28 a month on books, half of them online.

Though Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader have carved out the biggest chunk of the market--Forrester estimates sales for the two units hit the million-dollar mark for 2008--other companies have entered the fray. Fujitsu has released a color e-reader in Japan, while Samsung plans to unveil a touchscreen e-reader in South Korea this year. In Europe, Irex Technologies makes a versatile line of e-readers with touchscreens and Wi-Fi.

The Kindle's limitations also pave the way for newcomers, says Forrester. The Kindle is geared toward reading books, but other content can work on an e-reader, including textbooks, newspapers, magazines, comics, and even blogs. Much of that will fuel the need for larger screens, color displays, and the ability to highlight text and write notes. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has warned not to expect a color Kindle for many years.

Besides color and bigger screens, the competition will try to distinguish itself from the Kindle by offering touchscreens, animation, and eventually video. Forrester expects color displays to be available by the end of 2010, with video following in 2011 or 2012. The Kindle's lack of social networking also is a weakness, says the report, since people who buy books often like to discuss them with others and offer their reviews and recommendations.

There are other areas where the Kindle faces competition, notes Forrester. Amazon's price tags--$359 for the Kindle 2 and $489 for the Kindle DX--are beyond the budgets of many consumers. Even Sony's e-readers start at $299. With a decent Netbook selling for $300, the report says, e-reader prices will need to come down.

The Kindle is a sales hit in U.S. but lags throughout the rest of the world. Sony and other companies, such as Fujitsu and Irex Technologies, are better positioned to gain from higher worldwide demand for e-readers.

Publishers also have a love/hate relationship with Amazon, says Forrester. They love the Kindle as another profitable way to package their content. But they don't like the way Amazon hoards 70 percent of the profits, leaving publishers with only a 30 percent cut. The report expects other e-reader vendors to slice out better deals with publishers.

Overall, the next five years should see even stronger demand for electronic reading devices, says Forrester, with a large portion of that driven by students once textbooks are more prevalent on the portable format. Global demand, which now adds up to one-third of all e-reader sales, is likely to surge as well.

Research company In-Stat also predicts a soaring e-reader market ahead. As more e-readers are produced, their raw manufacturing costs will drop by 23 percent between 2009 and 2013, according to a new In-Stat report. Technology also will improve, the research firm says: today's e-readers use display technology from E Ink, but the future may see OLED screens to deliver higher-quality readers.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos shows off the Kindle DX

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET News)

NEW YORK--Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the much-anticipated large-screen Kindle e-reader in a lecture hall Wednesday at the downtown Pace University. Called the Kindle DX, the new device is geared toward readers of personal and professional documents, newspapers, and magazines--and textbooks, a potentially huge target market.

The debut of the bigger Kindle wasn't exactly a secret: rumors of a larger-screen Kindle had been around for quite some time, and concrete reports began to surface earlier this week.

Amazon's Kindle DX

(Credit: Amazon)

According to Amazon's Kindle DX page, the device has the following:

• A 9.7-inch display with 16 shades of gray. (The standard Kindle has a 6-inch display.)

• Capacity to hold up to 3,500 books, periodicals, and documents.

• An auto-rotating screen to show either portrait or landscape views.

• A built-in PDF reader.

• 3G wireless network support with no monthly fees or annual contracts.

• Battery capacity to "read for days without charging."

• Text-to-speech abilities to read publications aloud.

Several of those features are shared with the current Kindle 2, but several are unique to the Kindle DX: the native PDF reader that doesn't require the files to be converted, the rotating display, the 3,500-publication capacity compared to 1,500 for the Kindle 2, and of course the larger screen.

Updated at 12:25 p.m. on Saturday with notes about Hearst's plans to charge for some content online.

It looks as if the e-paper revolution is really about to start.

Hearst, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, announced on Friday that it has developed an electronic reader for newspapers and magazines, the way Amazon.com's new Kindle does for books. The publisher is also planning to put at least some of its online content behind a pay wall, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Soon you'll be able to read magazines and newspapers on an e-reader.

(Credit: Theoprahmag.com)

The e-reader news, first reported by Fortune magazine, is really significant, as Hearst owns about 16 daily and 49 weekly newspapers, and has a strong influence on hundreds of magazines. Examples of those include the San Francisco Chronicle, Oprah Winfrey's O, and Cosmopolitan.

It's unclear if the device Hearst has been working on has anything to do with the eReader that Plastic Logic unveiled recently, but its principle seems the same. It's a handheld device used to read digital content, much like the Kindle. The main difference would be that Hearst's e-reader has a much larger size to accommodate the format of newspapers and magazines.

At the same time as it is developing the device, Hearst is hoping for success in charging for access to at least some of its online content. A pay model for online content, as opposed to an advertising-supported free-access model, is something few publishers have managed to pull off.

Of the leading New York-based papers alone, The New York Times and News Corp.'s The Wall Street Journal have adopted, and backtracked on, both models. Cablevision's Newsday on Thursday also announced that it is implementing a pay-for-access model.

"Exactly how much paid content to hold back from our free sites will be a judgment call made daily by our management, whose mission should be to run the best free Web sites in our markets without compromising our ability to get a fair price from consumers for the expensive, unique reporting and writing that we produce each day," Steven Swartz, the president of Hearst newspapers, wrote in a staff memo obtained by the Journal.

Certainly, during a time in which papers right and left are folding under economic pressures or otherwise struggling to stay in operation, finding ways to profitably embrace digital media has become imperative for major and minor publishers alike.

"Our cost base is significantly out of line with the revenue available in our business today," Hearst's Swartz concluded, as he noted other advertising initiatives, such as partnering on advertising with real-estate site Zillow and Yahoo, and raising prices for print subscriptions and mobile-phone access to its content. "It is equally inescapable that during good times, our industry developed business practices that were, at best, inefficient."

It's also speculated that Hearst's e-reader is going to be physically flexible and even foldable. The first version would come in black and white, with a later model coming in color and even with video playback capability.

Once implemented, this would change the way newspapers and magazines are published. Instead of getting a print copy, you can just download the newest issues on the e-reader, wirelessly. No printing or paper is involved. Besides the environmental factor, this would cut down about 50 percent of the cost to circulate a periodical.

It's also not clear when you can get the first issue of Cosmopolitan on this new e-reader, but considering the recent launch of the Kindle 2 and the upcoming e-reader from Plastic Logic, Hearst's e-reader will probably be launched in 12 to 18 months.