Friday Project Founder on the UK and E-Readers

Q: eReaders. We can’t do a Q&A without asking about them. Love or hate? Or both?

A: Love them, in all their forms. At present the Kindle isn’t available over here and Amazon doesn’t seem to be in any great rush to change that. To be fair, I think it is down to the fact that they will need to have an option for the whole of the EU, not just the UK, before they go live. That means that the Sony Reader has a genuine foothold here. But there are still issues over pricing, availability and content for eBooks that need to be resolved before they will really take off. They are part of the future and we need to adapt to that.

Scott Pack, Publisher at Harper Collins UK. More here.


Friday Project.

Watch the IPhone Reading experience

But there's no soundtrack.


Iceberg for iPhone 3.0

Cool (Reading) Aid Test

New e-readers: wait ages and then two come along? This one is the Cool-er

So is the "E-Reader" a way to charge for content?

...does the Kindle form part of Murdoch's digital content masterplan? Apparently not.

"I can assure you, we will not be sending our content rights to the fine people who created the Kindle," he said. "We will control the prices for our content, and we will control the relationship with our customers."

So who is News Corp talking to about an ebook reader? There are a dozen or so products on the market. Kindle has been most successful in bringing newspaper publishers on board but its electronic paper competitors include the Sony Reader, the older iRex iLiad and Fujitsu's FELPia. The latter is colour too – a major advantage over its monochrome Amazon rival.

They would be looking at a subscription-based service on an existing reader or, though more unlikely, their own branded reader. That would be more costly and wouldn't make much sense for the consumer unless it could be opened to other content providers – and could we see News Corp setting itself up with an "open platform" publishing model, a la Facebook and Apple?

From The Guardian.


The battle of the e-readers is setting up to look like the online service wars of the mid nineties: CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, Minitel et al etc. What happened next: the web. So when Murdoch says: "The current days of the internet will soon be over," we should all wonder what's about to happen next.

Tech Avant Garde Around When Avant Garde Launched: Kindle Users are Old

50% of the people who use Kindles are over 50 years old. Twenty-seven percent were over 60.

Since the Kindle qualifies as "new technology", it is supposed to find its initial market among the young and impressionable. The opposite appears to be true. People who should have fixed habits including reading physical books using reading glasses are buying an electronic book reader instead.

The Kindle is not cheap. With money being tight, it may be that older, affluent consumers are much more likely to spend $359 than the younger, unemployed people who will graduate from college this year.

From Time.

How Long Before This?

The world and his dog, it would seem, want Apple to make a netbook. Even that part of the world that has no idea what a netbook is wants Apple to make one.

Ideas of the - short? - term, from MacFormat.

Kindle Upgrade Comes Early?

From Walking Circles.

E-books selling, no IPod moment yet though

...but, for those still anticipating an “iPod of e-books,” it’s still way short of the 1.3 million units the music player sold in it’s first two years.

That said, the iPod didn’t truly take off until more than two years into its life cycle. For now, Sony is playing against only a handful of rivals, Amazon’s net-connected Kindle chief among them,

From Paid Content.