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New e-book reader company, Kerouac bookchat tomorrow, Korean digital libraries, iPods in Iraq
August 22, 2006 | 10:21 am
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By Jon Noring
Links of the day:
–Bookpac, a German company planning to enter the e-book reader market and use an E Ink display. Take a user survey. A German version is here. More details later in this post. Feel free to share your survey responses via our comment box.
–Kerouac bookchat tomorrow—plus OPAL’s other forthcoming events, including discussions of works of Illinois authors such as Ray Bradbury (topic of a new interview in Publishers Weekly). The featured Kerouac book is On the Road. Coming Friday: A chatcast on Lauren Weisberger‘s The Devil Wears Prada.
–Korea eyes nurturing digital libraries, in LISNews. See Korea Times story.
–iPods at war, in Slashdot. Pickup of Ars Technica.
Bookpac details, from Bookpack participant Joscha Bach, via Librie list
On my desk, there is a Librié next to a V2 and an iLiad. None of them makes me completely happy. So we got some friends together, set up a company (Bookpac, in Berlin) with partners in China, and now we want to know if there is some demand for a decent eInk based hardware, particularly in Germany.
We think that such a device should be cheap, robust, have a very long battery life and allow for a range of formats as wide as possible. But perhaps other people have different priorities, such as a touchscreen to annotate text with a pen, and are willing to trade battery life and so on.
So we have set up a survey on our website www.bookpac.com/survey. Please have a look and let us know what you’d expect of eBook hardware. We are not into gathering your addresses, we just want to know your opinion. And yes, you can win some Amazon vouchers if you participate.
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Comments:
The more I use my 2 ebook readers (Nokia 770/Fbreader, Ebookwise1150), the more I tend to think that due to the nature of books it’s going to be very hard to come up with one-size fits all device like the ipod for music.
The big tradeoff is pocketable vs screen size, but there are lots of other things that though technically solvable, currently are big issues. Right now I would not trade my Nokia770 for the Iliad or the Sony reader since I do not care that much about reading in sunlight as opposed to reading fast, at night or on the go.
So while I answered the survey, I do not think that a new ebook reading device is going to magically transform the moribund commercial ebook arena into a vibrant one. There are enough devices out there, and though each has flaws I think that’s in large part intrinsic to the nature of books as 2 dimensional objects that require reasonable privacy to read. The only “ebook” success story is the short, limited attention required, chunky object that we know as an html web page.
To make ebooks in the traditional sense a success, massive digitization of most pbooks ever published (say the Library of Congress content) is necessary and until that’s done legally or not, no device is going to make a difference, so the quest for the “ipod” of books is quixotic and doomed to failure for now.
Liviu
The introduction to the survey seems to imply that it is mainly aimed at those who tote around kilos of printed paper on a regular basis, and not so much at the casual reader who wants something to do while riding on a train or waiting in a queue.
It’s interesting to see how many people want to have e-paper. Apart from the very, very few people who suffer “eye strain”, they don’t seem to have a real need for it. I wouldn’t mind having an upgraded eBookman or eBookwise-1150, without the silly market and copy restrictions. But I would use it for recreational reading.