TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Plastic Logic’ Category

By David Rothman

You’ve seen similar info before.

But now the Times in the U.K.—a partner of Plastic Logic—is saying launch of the Plastic Logic e-reader in the States will be in at the start of 2010.

Price is to be similar to the Kindle’s, now selling for $299. UK launch is to follow later that year or the next.

Meanwhile thanks to Ted Treanor for the pointer to a related Forbes article saying that “The number of eReaders sold in the U.S. will top 3 million by the end of 2009, with 13 million selling by the end of 2013, Forrester forecast in a research note published last month.”

Also of interest: Google roundup on the Plastic Logic machine.

By Paul Biba

Update, 5:08 p.m., July 23: See a July 21 Ad Age piece on B&N’s chances against Amazon, which could benefit from such advantages as the “stickiness” of its store site. We’re reproducing an excerpt below our original item.

An excellent article at ZDNet by Larry Dignan chronicles B&N’s plans for e-books. This is "real" competition for the Kindle and B&N has the software and the ebooks to hit the ground running. The article doesn’t say whether the Plastic Logic unit will be wireless, but we know that Plastic Logic has promised this technology. In addition, in another blow to Amazon, the Plug Your Book blog is reporting that B&N will be offering a 6% affiliate commission. Amazon currently offers 0% on Kindle books.

Barnes & Noble has outlined its answer for Amazon’s Kindle: A partnership with Plastic Logic, which will launch an eReader in early 2010, and plans to open its e-book sales to multiple platforms.

In a statement Monday, Barnes & Noble said its e-book store will allow customers to buy books and read them on the iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry and Windows and Mac PCs. Barnes & Noble will also be the exclusive store provider of the Plastic Logic eReader. … “We were the first to enter the e-book market in 2001, but the demand wasn’t there,” said William J. Lynch Jr., president of Barnesandnoble.com, on a conference call.

Lynch also noted that Barnes & Noble will support the open EPub e-book standard, which is “good for the consumer.” …

* The Barnes & Noble e-book store will have access to 700,000 titles for $9.99;
* Public domain books from Google will be available (and are included in the 700,000 title tally); [Half a million of the 700,000 titles are freebies from Google, according to PC World.]
* Lynch said that the Barnes & Noble e-book store will top 1 million titles shortly;
* Barnes & Noble’s eReader application is device agnostic.

Excerpt (inserted July 23)

Rita Chang at Advertising Age has just done a nice overview article on the competitive arena that B&N is operating in. I haven’t seen an article take that tack before. Here are three short quotes, one from our own David Rothman:

"The question is: Why didn’t they just come out with their own reader? Why have they chosen a partner that doesn’t have a product that exists yet?" Ms. Rotman Epps [a Forrester analyst] asked.

Ms. Rotman Epps said she had not heard from Plastic Logic "a convincing strategy for marketing and distributing their product. They may still be formulating a strategy, or they may just be unwilling to discuss it."

Right now, Barnes & Noble has no plans to leverage one of its greatest assets: It does not intend to integrate its popular loyalty program with its e-book service, at least not initially, Ms. Rotman Epps said.

"That’s a huge missed opportunity for Barnes & Noble to tap into its most engaged customer base," she said. …

"It’s going to be a very big challenge for Barnes & Noble," said David Rothman, editor and publisher of the e-book blog TeleRead.org, adding that Amazon has a lot of stickiness on its side.

"People simply like the huge bank of book reviews from customers built up over the years, [and they] like to use Amazon to keep records of purchases," he said. "Barnes & Noble has customer comments on books and is otherwise trying to build up its community site. But it has a long way to go. It has not integrated the community aspects into its book pages as extensively as Amazon has." …

"It has to out-distribute Amazon, and out-partner these guys in the field, whether it’s [mobile] platform vendors like Android or wireless operators," said John Jackson, VP-research at CCS Insight. "It’s about picking the ones that give you the quickest path to scale."

By David Rothman

The new Plastic Logic e-reader, the one to be sold by Barnes & Noble among others, will use the AT&T net for 3G wireless downloading of e-books, according to the Wall Street Journal and PaidContent.

So what will this mean? An even more overloaded AT&T data network—already struggling on occasions with the burden from the iPhone? More positively, the Plastic Logic arrangement will be international thanks to the GSM tech in use, and WiFi alternatives will be available in certain hotspots, not just your office or home.

Related: Plastic Logic news release and Fox News video interview with Daren Benzi, vice president of business development at Plastic Logic, who, alas, still isn’t giving out price info.

By David Rothman

A big-screen, newspaper-optimized Kindle might appear as early as this week, according to the New York Times—in fact, on Wednesday if you go by an All Things Digital report.

The wireless device would be “tailored for displaying newspapers, magazines and perhaps textbooks,” the Times’ Brad Stone says.

And possibly other e-books? Maybe in a double-columned mode?

Within the newspaper world, the Times is said to be among the publications with arrangements with Amazon.

The rumored Apple tab

But might newspaper subscribers get more excited in the end about the rumored Apple tablet? Unlike the E Ink Kindle, the tablet would probably use LCD technology and offer color.

News organizations like USA Today and the Associated Press already provide good-looking editions for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Imagine how the news would look in color on an Apple tablet with a five-inch screen. Shown here is USA Today’s iPhone edition on my iPod Touch (the image as seen on a big monitor is larger than on the Touch itself). (more…)

By David Rothman

The rumors have been wafting around for months—that a large screen Kindle will materialize with the student market in mind. And we hear of Kindles for Detroit newspaper subscribers, an app that would lend itself to large screens.

Last sign of the bound-to-happen is a Wall Street Journal report saying that the big screen Kindle could “debut before the 2009 holiday season,” as told by “people who said they have seen a version.”

The image, via Engadget, shows one of the Kindle’s rivals, the Plastic Logic Reader, which is to be another choice for Detroit subscribers.

Related: Techmeme roundup, ChannelWeb, TechFlash and Silicon Valley Insider.

By David Rothman

PL reader coming from B&N? (TeleRead video.)

A Kindle rival will be on the way from Barnes & Noble, according to a rumor cited in a number of places, including jkOnTheRun, which correctly notes B&N’s recent acquisition of Fictionwise.

Is B&N among the e-reader-related companies that have approached AT&T for wireless service? Perhaps, though it could have happened through a partner.

Fictionwise, which B&N bought for $15.7 million, has sold its eBookwise-branded machines from ETI. Another possibility would be Plastic Logic, with which Fictionwise already has a business relationship.

ePub capability would also be a nice touch for a B&N reader if the rumor is true, and I suspect it will be there, through Fictionwise software.

Let’s hope that BN.com will also go for FW’s nonDRMed multiformat approach in cases when publishers allow it. This would be a wonderful way for B&N to distinguish its e-book offerings from Amazon’s, assuming that Jeff Bezos doesn’t beat B&N to the punch with his own nonDRMed bookstore. Amazon already sells nonDRMed music.

By David Rothman

Plastic Logic is mum. A spokesperson would say only that the company is "involved in a number of strategic discussions." My best guess is that the rumors are true for now. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation will go ahead with a deal.

Related: All Kindled up, Rupert Murdoch might invest in a K-rival with a ‘four color’ screen. Plastic Logic reader?

By David Rothman

People on various e-mail lists are mulling over the hardware ramifications of Barnes & Noble’s buy of Fictionwise.

Will we finally see an E Ink device branded and sold by Fictionwise—perhaps developed by ETI, the current supplier of FW’s LCD-based eBookWise machines? Or how about the e-paper gizmo, with the 11-inch screen, from Plastic Logic? That’s the company for which Fictionwise is to create an e-store.

Might the PL device also carry B&N branding as part of a war against the Kindle? Since PL is so open to others doing their own branding, this just might happen at both Fictionwise and B&N’s forthcoming e-bookstore. A guess, nothing more.

The photos and video of the PL machine, by the way, were made by TeleRead Co-Editor Paul Biba during the 2009 Tools of Change conference in New York.

Notice the Kindle to the right of the PL device in the lower photo? That’s a nice size comparison. Meanwhile the video, though flawed, should give you a feel for the possibilities of the Plastic Logic reader. In terms of screen quality, I’d have liked more contrast between the text and background. But like Paul’s brave video efforts, this is a helpful start.

Double click on the upper photo and the video for more detail.

Other possible FW/B&N synergy: E-and-P synching (a way to help safeguard BN’s stores?)

I’ll also be curious if Fictionwise and B&N can encourage the sale of discounted bundles of electronic and paper books. You know—read on the road on your iPhone or E Ink machine and at home with your paper book. There might even be syncing possibilities. Fictionwise perhaps could devise a way to search for paper page numbers within suitably formatted e-books keyed to specific paper editions. Also, you might be able to check your e-book gizmo for the paper page number, so you could effortlessly read on when you switched to the pulped-wood edition.

Simply put, who says the syncing should only happen between different e-book-capable devices? Or between audio books and e-books? Now that Fictionwise and B&N control the eReader format, many good things could create synergies between E and P.

Reminder of the obvious: Amazon could well do its own e-and-p syncing. Great. I hope it happens. But with all those stores around, B&N has one helluva lot more incentive to be the e-and-p synch leader.

Also of interest: Nelson makes books available in all formats in one price, in PW.

Speaking of hardware: Check out Dear Author’s detailed comparison of the new Kindle and the Sony Readers. Jane likes the Sony better because of its sidelighting, among other things—just the ticket for nighttime reading when you don’t want to disturb your spouse. But she correctly says your reading needs may differ from hers.

By Paul Biba

Fortune is reporting that Hearst will be launching its own e-reader this year.  Hearst has evidently “developed a wireless e-reader with a large-format screen suited to the reading and advertising requirements of newspapers and magazines. The device and underlying technology, which other publishers will be allowed to adapt, is likely to debut this year.” … What Hearst and its partners plan to do is sell the e-readers to publishers and to take a cut of the revenue derived from selling magazines and newspapers on these devices. The company will, however, leave it to the publishers to develop their own branding and payment models.

I wonder if the hardware might be coming from Plastic Logic.  One of the goals of their new machine, to be released later this year, is to allow for the comfortable reading of newspapers.

By Chris Meadows

The crux of many of the “can newspapers be saved” articles we have covered in recent months is whether consumers would be willing to pay for content. In a recent article, Slate—itself a veteran of attempting to charge users for content—looks at kinds of content for which consumers might be willing to pay.

In the article, Jack Shafer writes:

Not all successful paid sites are alike, but they all share at least one of these attributes: 1) They are so amazing as to be irreplaceable. 2) They are beautifully designed and executed and extremely easy to use. 3) They are stupendously authoritative.

As examples, Shafer cites ConsumerReports.org (the web-based version of Consumer Reports magazine), the Major League Baseball pay-per-view (or -listen) website MLB.tv, and the iTunes Music Store.

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By Paul Biba

One of the best phone/tech/pda sites on the web is Palm-Mac. In a post today, which I will quote below, he mentions the real reason for the success of the iPhone - making it easy to use. I agree 100% with his conclusions. I’ll discuss how it relates to e-readers after the break.

Should manufacturers stick to what they know best and keep their market share or do they have to branch out with different form factors to try and grab a bigger slice of the pie and risk losing what they already hold?

Blackberry flip It must be difficult for them at times, seeing how well the iPhone has done and thus needing to retaliate with a look-alike phone f their own. But, is the success of the iPhone down to the form factor or just the fact that it is so easy to use? I’m not so sure it is all down the former although the big screen is obviously a factor, there are plenty of people out there after all who just do not get on with the onscreen keyboard and would prefer a physical qwerty kepyad.

Nope, I think it has done well because it works well, is easy to use, has a simple method of adding apps to it, syncs easily with iTunes and thus a user can get all their photos, songs and videos across simply without having to resort to unreliable 3rd party software. These are the main things people want in a phone and is something other platforms have yet to master.

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By David Rothman

An Adobe press release follows.

While I dislike eBabel—PDF is among the many clashing format, in a war highly confusing to consumers—the above is still great news for public library users.

PDF is among the more popular formats. And Adobe’s new support for software and hardware developers will also encompass ePub , the IDPF’s standard, which will become increasingly common for library users and others.

Reflowable PDF means that line lengths can more easily fit the size of the screen—especially handy for small-screened mobile devices such as the Cybook. The latest Sony Readers, the PRS-505 and PRS-700, already use the technology.

I’ll be curious to see how smooth the reflowability process is for other machines and in various software apps.

Another issue is the extent to which owners of existing machines, as distinguished from users of easily upgradable apps like Stanza, will be able to enjoy the new capabilities. I’ll welcome further comments from Adobe on these issues.

Update, 2:06 Washington time: Still another issue is whether the vendors will follow through, now that the software developers kit is available. My belief is that the overwhelming majority will. Stanz/Lexcycle and Plastic Logic are already committed, and iRex and Bookeen have hoped for the ability to read DRMed PDF.

DRM capabilities offered as well—for PDF and ePub

Significantly the news release mentions DRM, needed to read most public library books if they’re still under copyright. Of course, this is a proprietary "feature," meaning that ePub books will not be readable with "protection" systems other than Adobe’s. Still, the ability to read ePub, the best eBabel fighter so far, is praiseworthy.

One other question is what this means in terms of legalities from Mobipocket, the Amazon-owned software company, which is said to ban competing DRM-capable apps from E Ink machines. Will the Cybook-type devices be able to offer both the new Adobe capabilities and the existing Mobi? Let’s hope so. If not, maybe it’s time for the U.S. and EU to modify  anti-trust laws if need be to apply to such situations.

Shown is a Cybook, in an old photo, without reflowable PDF involved. - D.R.

Related: OverDrive: BBC audio books to be available to libraries via OverDrive (The Bookseller) and Mobile Flash apps to get better distribution, more money (Techmeme roundup).

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