Sony is diving into the tablet race, announcing Tuesday that is working on two gadgets that will hit the market this fall.
The publishing tide is shifting fast: E-book sales in February topped all other formats, including paperbacks and hardcovers, according to an industry report released this week.
Apple has responded to the furor over its supposed App Store policy changes that many believe could affect the popular Kindle, Nook, and Sony Reader apps.
OK, bookworms, now you can declare Armageddon: Kindle e-books have overtaken paperback books as the bestselling type of content in Amazon's bookstore.
E Ink screens, which are designed to be easy on the eyes, are used widely in electronic book readers like the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader. But they never featured color displays until now.
The first generation of electronic readers had little more than black-and-white text. The second generation had black-and-white text, simple graphics and Web connectivity.
When Dan Brown's blockbuster novel "The Lost Symbol" hit stores in September, it may have offered a peek at the future of bookselling.
After letting Kindle dominate the e-book reader market for two years, Sony has fired a huge salvo in return.
Like many geeks, I love gadgets and I love to read. Since I've found that my rate of giving away old books is slower than the rate at which I get new ones and my bookshelf is always at eyesore-full capacity, I've wondered if e-books are everything they're cracked up to be?
Fortune: The end of paper?updated: Tue Mar 03 2009 11:44:00
Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. Mark Twain's advice was apt in its time but sounds downright quaint these days. The ink-stained publishing world is battling against companies like Google and Yahoo that sell ads via any Internet-friendly gadget. And we know how that fight is going: The buy-ink-by-the-barrel types are struggling.
Against a backdrop of plummeting ad revenue for newspapers and magazines, and rising costs for paper and delivery, Hearst Corp., is getting set to launch an electronic reader that it hopes can do for periodicals what Amazon's Kindle is doing for books.
Read any good e-books lately? It's a question coming soon to a water cooler near you.
On this month's CNN Business Traveller, Richard Quest gets to grips with the electronic book, road testing the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle.
Electronic books
updated: Thu Dec 18 2008 06:16:00
Why lug around a weighty tome when you could simply load your book and run? We test the latest electronic books.
Fortune: Me and my Kindleupdated: Thu Jul 24 2008 23:26:00
I can't possibly convey the wild excitement that surged through my heart when I first read about the Kindle. I can tell you the exact date: Nov. 19, 2007. The Kindle had just been announced, by Jeff Bezos himself. I read about it online, and my lust for a piece of technology that instantly implied a complete lack of technological expertise was immediately ... kindled. What a divine thing: It was simultaneously new and old. It was an homage to books without in any way promising their extinction. Within seconds of reading about it, I went to Amazon, pressed my one-click and bought myself a Kindle. I became so overexcited that I contemplated buying Amazon stock. A few minutes later I was so carried away with the thrill of it all that I ordered two more, for each of my sons. No socks this year, guys. No shirts that I like but you don't. No books that I already gave you and forgot that I did. I've done it: the Kindle. A great gift and what's more, a gift that promised to go on giving,
Back in 2000, the handheld electronic book was thought to be as much a part of the future as MP3s, broadband video, and ad-supported websites. That year, Forrester Research predicted $251 million in sales of e-book content by 2005. It seemed a modest goal, but today the market is so small that Forrester doesn't even track it. Held back by a lack of available titles and stifling copy protection, the e-book reader gathered dust while other dotcom-era innovations flourished.
Acknowledging its proprietary audio technology was a marketplace flop, Sony Corp. is shuttering its Connect digital music store and will open its portable media players to other formats.
Digital reading devices were hardly bestsellers when they landed on the scene a few years ago, but Sony is betting that its newest entry will be the iPod of ink. The Sony Reader will be released ea...
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