E-Reader-info is reporting that DisplaySearch says shipments of e-paper increased to 5 million units in 2009, up 417% on year from 950,000 units in 2008, mainly due to the popularity of e-book readers. The Amazon Kindle has 66% of the total e-paper market according to DisplaySearch, which means that they sold 3.3 million units.
Laptop Magazine reviews the PocketBook 360. They like the unit, but feel that it is overpriced for what it offers.
Publishing Perspectives says that according to Publishers Weekly’s report on the annual publishing stats compiled by R.R. Bowker, 2009 saw a whopping 764,448 titles were produced in 2009 by “self-publishers and micro-niche publishers.” PW says the “number of ‘nontraditional’ titles dwarfed that of traditional books whose output slipped to 288,355 last year from 289,729 in 2008. Taken together, total book output rose 87% last year, to over 1 million books.
The Laptop Mag review was horrible. I think they missed the point of the device: for only a little more than the Sony Pocket edition, you get a device that can do so much more: dictionary, annotation, games, full control over the display and fonts, touchless page turns with accelerometer, etc. They also implied that the Sony had a superior bookstore, which is incorrect because ANY Adobe DRM enabled device can use Sony’s bookstore. There is no advantage in using Pocketbook’s store and if the reviewers had any real knowledge of ebook reading devices, they would realize this.