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Technology news and Jobs 
Our Blogs ShrinkAge Finally - the year of the e-book?
Our Blogs ShrinkAge Finally - the year of the e-book? | Finally - the year of the e-book? |
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| ShrinkAge - personal and global mobility | |
| by Charles Wright | |
| Wednesday, 19 December 2007 | |
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Page 2 of 3 Henry's genius killed the e-book market, practically overnight. As users stopped buying the REB 1100, the decline in demand influenced publishers to stop formatting their content for the device. Like so many disillusioned owners, I now had a $500 white elephant. One after another, the big publishers who'd initially expressed enthusiasm for the idea closed their e-book subsidiaries, like AtRandom (Random House) and iPublish (AOL Time Warner). To some extent, they'd contributed to the debacle. The range of new titles was limited and not - as they should have been - much cheaper than conventional books. Then Thomson Consumer Electronics stopped manufacturing the REB 1100. It's slim compensation for the true believers of the e-book world that Henry subsequently served time and was forced to pay $22 million in restitution, penalties and interest, plus $93.6 million to the company over a scheme to inflate the company's revenues. There have been several attempts since then to resuscitate the industry, all doomed to failure because the platforms were deficient. The Korean-developed HiEbook was one contender, but it was too expensive, and its reverse backlit display meant it was less comfortable for the bedtime reader than the Rocket eBook. The French-developed Cybook looked promising, but its landed price in Australia of $1500 assured it was never going to stir much interest. The e-book lived on only on devices like the Palm (itself looking more and more, every day, a candidate for the elephant's graveyard). I know a lot of readers will testify that they LOVE reading e-books on their Treos and Windows Mobile screens. They claim they don't mind a bit reading on their laptops and their UMPCs, but the experience all-purpose devices - particularly small ones - bring to reading simply doesn't exploit the potential. I got a little more excited about Sony's initiative - the Sony Reader. It uses a six-inch E Ink display that finally improves on the Rocket eBook. Its major drawback is that you can only order books through the Sony site, and there's no indication in any case, when or whether Sony will bring the reader into Australia. There's a similar problem with Amazon's new Kindle. You can't set up an account without a US address, and the fact that its EVDO card won't work in Australia severely reduces its functionality. Besides, it looks ugly. I had my hopes raised a few months ago, when an Adelaide company called Ubiq Technologies Pty Ltd, developed something called the Quokkapad, with the input of an American academic, Professor Richard Bellaver of Ball State University, who has been conducting extensive research on ebooks. |
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