Comments on: Cell phones as e-readers may be important to publishing’s future

By: Roland Dobbins

Roland Dobbins — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:47:15 +0000

Doh, I misread your article – sorry about that! It’s the initial commenter with whom I disagree. My apologies for conflating your views with his!

I do disagree with the contention of some that heavy reading with existing smartphones leads to eyestrain. The gorgeous screens on all the iPhone/iPod Touch models lend themselves quite well to reading for long periods of time.

By: Chris Meadows

Chris Meadows — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:41:08 +0000

Roland, your post confuses me. You claim we don’t know what we’re talking about, and then you agree with us?

(Well, with me anyway.)

By: Roland Dobbins

Roland Dobbins — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:37:44 +0000

Both the author of this post and the first commentator don’t know what they’re talking about, per usual. I’ve purchased ~225 Kindle books and ~30 Baen ebooks in the last 2.5 years; I’ve read ~100 Kindle books on my iPhone since the Kindle app became available, ~15 Baen books on my iPhone, and my hardware Kindle gathers dust.

Reading books on the iPhone via the Kindle for iPhone and Bookshelf apps is infinitely superior to reading them on the hardware Kindl, IMHO, due to the greater physical portability, larger storage, backlighting, and interational multimode communications (3G, WiFi) which have been available for the iPhone reading apps from the moment these reader applications were published in the iTMS.

Both the original author of this post and the initial commentator are simply pretending their own personal preferences/biases are objective fact; they should really know better.

By: Felix Torres

Felix Torres — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:48:49 +0000

Erik Peterson is exactly right.
Ebook reading on cellphones is a force *today* in several asian markets and is on the rise in the west, where early adopters have been reading on PDAs for over a decade and a significant share of cellphone users are reading both short and long-form content on smartphones *today*.
Kindle for iPod exists for a reason.
B&N Reader, eReader, and all the ebook apps on the iPxxx exist for a reason.
And that reason is that people are using them.
To pretend significant numbers of people are not reading on cellphones and iPods today is to reside in BPH dreamland.

It is important to remember that in many parts of the world cellphones are the *only* computer people have access to. To deprecate that mobile platform is to ignore a vast market and anybody that ignores significant markets invariably pays for it.

Dedicated readers are important today and will be important for at least a whie.
Tablets may or not be important in the short and long term; only time will tell.
But cellphones are important today and *will* be important indefinitely.

By: Erik Peterson

Erik Peterson — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:45:27 +0000

I may be mistaken here, but to my understanding in Japan, and I think Korea, there is a large group of people reading books on their cell phones. I think many of them are more novella size. I think part of why things have not taken off here as much is our fragmented distribution market and countries like Japan are further ahead on the adoption curve of smart phones. I have read articles about book stores in japan being angry because people were using their cell phone cameras to take pictures of magazines and then walking away to read them on their phones. Plus the market options may drive cell phone reading options as well. In India it is harder to find a book store in the rural areas, but they have cell phones that can download it instantly. Also I think I have heard about a fairly high adoption of cell phones in Africa, where people do not have a computer necessarily but phones are more readily available. An article eariler here on Teleread mentioned that publshing in Egypt often only had a reach of 5km of their publishing house. So cell phones seem a natural way to get out their product to a wide group of people quickly and easily in the most common portable device around, the cell phone.

By: Allen Lau

Allen Lau — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:48:52 +0000

Re: I do not believe much long form reading (full length books) are done on the phones.

We are serving millions of books to Smartphone and non-Smartphone users every month. For example, on iPhone/iPod, our users are spending close to 1.5 hour/day to read Wattpad’s content.

You can also check out our metrics report if you want to know the detail:

http://www.wattpad.com/metricsreport

By: Devini

Devini — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:12:49 +0000

I agree with Christo. I’ve read books on my Palm T/X, HTC Touch, iPod Touch and iPhone. They make much better readers than the Sony eReaders I’ve tried and I’ve tried them all since the 505 or the Kindle. In fact, my iPhone and iPod Touch are what I use all the time. The first commentator knows not of what they speak.

By: Christo

Christo — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:37:03 +0000

I have read several hundred books on Windows Mobile phones between 2004-2008, and many more on iPhone since then. It is possible, it is convenient and certainly works for me.

Reading doostop books like Anathem on the iPhone is certainly easier when travelling!

By: Richard Askenase

Richard Askenase — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:30:16 +0000

This has been discussed many times, but is still important. I do not believe much long form reading (full length books) are done on the phones. Short form yes- articles, even short stories. But novels, no.

On the convergence devices like the iPad, no more than 10% of the time on the device will be used to read BOOKS, and the same is true with cell phones, IMHO. So, not that big a factor.