The e-book writes its second chapter

On the eve of the Australian launch of Amazon's Kindle DX with Global Wireless e-book reader and the rumoured announcement of an Apple iSlate "smartbook", iTnews asked Alexander Turcic for his thoughts on the industry's direction. Turcic has wrangled the ebook enthusiast community since 2004 at his ebook blog and forum website, mobileread.com.

iTnews: What does the launch of the Kindle DX for Global Wireless mean for the spread of Amazon's ambitions? Is this a pre-emptive strike against Sony's e-reader and Apple's Slate? What does it mean for bookseller Barnes and Noble's Nook, which doesn't have such a footprint? And can Amazon succeed in territories outside the US by selling only directly and not having a partner program of computer dealers and distributors reselling their devices and integrating them into corporate networks?

Turcic: Amazon announcing the worldwide release of the DX wasn't a surprise, but it is nevertheless an important development for the e-book movement outside the US. The problem abroad has been, until now, that many (for instance European) publishers felt reassured in defending their paper territory, making e-books as unpleasant an experience as possible.

Whether riddled by complicated DRM procedures (Sony Reader in Germany required you to download Adobe Digital Editions along with the Sony Software, download a personal key that is part of the DRM to your computer, and so on) or restricted by a very limited choice of book titles - in many countries, such as Germany, e-books are still in their infancy. It needs someone like Amazon to achieve what Apple did to the music industry: put enough pressure on the existing industry (here the publishers) to force them to embrace the new technology rather than to oppose it.

Whether Amazon had Sony or Apple in mind when making the announcement I cannot tell. I guess not so much Sony, since Sony has been building its territory abroad for quite some time and Amazon didn't feel the need to immediate respond. It could be that Amazon saw the need for a pre-emptive strike against Apple, which has already proven its success in shaping and dominating the music service business.

To succeed, Amazon would have to focus on foreign publishers and find ways to convince them to release more titles in e-book form, just as they did in the US. It is not going to be as easy because other important markets, such as Europe, are not as homogeneous as the US.

For instance, in Switzerland, prices for books are not fixed; here it would be possible to significantly lower the costs of e-books. Laws in other European countries like Germany require all bookstores, including online sellers, to sell books at fixed prices (they say, to protect independent bookstores and small publishers).

Amazon needs to find ways other than discounts on e-books to attract new customers to the Kindle.

What are the leading digital book formats?

Certainly MOBI and ePub.

AZW for the Amazon Kindle is the same format as MOBI, except that it uses a slightly different DRM [digital restrictions management] scheme. MOBI was developed by the French company Mobipocket, which Amazon acquired in 2005 (long before the Kindle). Simply because of Amazon's sheer market size, MOBI is a leading format.

ePub is an open format defined by the Open eBook Forum of the International Digital Publishing Forum. Because an increasing number of e-book devices are supporting ePub (among them the Sony Reader devices, HanLin, BeBook, Bookeen and Netronix), it is considered an evolving standard. However, incompatibility can still be an issue if the embedded DRM scheme is not supported by the reader device firmware. Most ePub supporting devices today (but not all, like e.g. the Jetbook) also support ADEPT, the DRM scheme from Adobe Digital Editions. DRM-support is essential for reading purchased ePub e-books, most of which are protected by DRM.

With so many readers and formats what is the likelihood that consumers will become confused and delay their decision to buy? Amazon may have the dominant slice of the market but there are dozens of e-readers and as many file formats; is this inhibiting the growth of ebooks?

No, I don't think the number of new readers inhibits growth. When I visited the Frankfurt Book Fair (world's largest book fair) two years ago, almost nobody seemed interested in e-books, and only two known players were on the market: Sony (with their Reader PRS-500) and iRex (with the iLiad). Of these two, only iRex was present at the fair. When I asked the iRex rep about rumors that Amazon might start their own e-book device, he told me (with a sincere glow in his eyes) that his company wasn't afraid of Amazon; in fact, they'd embrace Amazon and anyone else who would enter the market, because with an increased number of companies and devices on the market, production costs would go down (keep in mind: so far most e-book devices are based on E Ink, a former MIT-spinoff that got recently acquired by PVI, a Taiwanese company, who happens to be also the panel producer for most e-book device vendors).

Also, it would require the constant inflow of news (new devices, new players) to make prospective customers aware that e-books are not just a short-term fad.

In regard to the different formats, I think the problem was more severe before ePub began its way towards becoming a de facto standard. For instance, until recently, Sony (the second biggest player after Amazon), used their own proprietary e-book format called BBeB. BBeB was guaranteed to only work with Sony Devices, so if you ever decided to switch to a non-Sony device, you'd not have been able to bring along your existing e-book library.

Last month, however, Sony switched to ePub; in fact, as a Sony customer, I was able to redownload all of my previously purchased e-books in ePub format, which I could then read on other (authorised) devices as well. One of the reasons why ePub has become successful in recent months is, paradoxically, Amazon's market dominance. Smaller players realised that the best chance to compete against Amazon and their competitive e-book pricing is to embrace ePub, a non-proprietary format that would give the customer the flexibility to read e-books on other devices as well (something Amazon doesn't).

Flick to the second page to find out which of LCD or Electronic Ink is best for book reading?

And learn how QuokkaPad, the Australian ebook, plans to take on Amazon, Apple and Microsoft.

Electronic ink or LCD: which is better for which application and why?

Definitely E Ink.

E Ink (or more generally electronic paper, of which E Ink is just a variant), was designed to mimic the appearance of regular ink on paper.

Light is reflected on the display, and no power is used to display a page since the electronic ink is bi-stable. E Ink (as mentioned before, a former MIT-spinoff) is currently employed in most if not all electronic paper-based e-book readers on the market. But other technologies are said to enter the market as early as this year; some of them might flexible, others could even offer colour.

What are your thoughts on the rumoured Apple iSlate: will it really be the start of the mainstream adoption of ebooks? Is it a threat or opportunity to ebook makers and suppliers of content? For instance, does Apple have the ability to do to books what it did with music, mobile apps and films?

Apple is surprisingly late. Members at MobileRead love to humor Steve Jobs with a quote of him saying (back in 2008, when the Kindle arrived):

"It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore." I think Mr. Jobs has underestimated the importance of e-books and also the quick growth that Amazon has experienced with the introduction of the Kindle.

Don't get me wrong. Apple entering the market would be a fantastic thing for the e-book movement, and if we can see the much-rumoured Apple Tablet to become true, then I am convinced it will foster the mainstream adoption of e-books - which has already began since the introduction of the Kindle btw. Apple produces wonderful devices, and they have a way of gathering the crowd behind them, so, yes, it is quite possible that they would be able to do the same to e-books as they did with music. I am sure Barnes and Nobles, Borders, and all other brick and mortar shops are dreading the moment.

What are some vertical markets (applications or content) that would benefit from e-readers that are yet to be well represented? For instance, professional services, technical, health etc? How might e-books slot into these areas?

It's too early to tell, since, as far as I am aware of, there've been almost no professional applications of e-book devices yet. One application I am aware of is the iRex iLiad, one of the first e-book devices that was released by the Dutch company iRex. One OEM application, the ARINC eFlyBook, targeted private, commercial and military airplane pilots. My guess is that before e-readers will be more readily applied in professional services, the display technology will have to improve further. Color and higher resolution are two major decisive factors.

What are the unintended consequences of digitising printed matter for use on e-reader devices or across the web? Are digital books just like real books but only better?

It's not necessarily a matter of better or worse. In the beginning, people thought that e-books would have to do the same thing as printed books, and of course they would have to do it better, else why switch.

Nowadays, with new mass-production-ready technologies at hand (e-paper, wireless connectivity), the focus lies on content, convenience, and portability. E-books are there not to substitute e-books, but to complement them.

Can digital magazines (eg zmags) coexist with ebooks? Will the two merge? (ie which e-reader devices also display flash through a web browser?)

I don't see a reason for a digital magazine not to offer their content on e-books as well. Flash is merely a technology poshing up the Web; what matters is the underlying content. The beauty of today's world of technology is that many things got standardised. Many if not most publishers have their content in some kind of documented XML raw format, that, when used with the right software tools, can be automatically converted to a (reflowable) format for e-books.

Continue to page 3 to find out when the printed book will die.

Will e-books and their readers take over from print matter?

They won't. They will coexist. They will complement each other. Ultimately, we will see more people reading books again than we did in the past.

Nielsen Bookscan doesn't track e-book sales: without independent and verifiable sales data how can authors and publishers scope sales and plan? Who is tracking the growth of sales of content and readers?

Obviously Amazon isn't getting tired of telling us how well e-book sales are performing, but they shy away from giving us any hard figures. IDPF is publishing industry statistics, collected from quarterly US trade retail e-book sales in conjunction with the Association of American Publishers (AAP). The statistics don't include the sales of readers, and they focus on the US.

What are e-readers' flaws and how may they be overcome?

The biggest flaw is the young age of e-paper technology. Until recently, most e-book devices shared the same display size (6 inch), smaller than a regular paperbook with less room to display text and/or graphics. With recent advances in the production of e-paper, Amazon was able to come out with the Kindle DX (9.7 inch) and Sony with the Daily Edition (7 inch). Another limiting factor is the lack of colour. Until now, we haven't seen a market-ready e-book device that features e-paper and colour. This is supposed to change in 2010, when alternative e-paper technologies, such as Pixel Qi, enter the market.

What value-added reseller channel strategies should e-reader makers follow? They can't all be Amazon or Google with access to the content so should they look at joining with ISPs or 3G mobile providers, for instance?

Yes, I believe this is the right way to go. Sony has indirectly shown, by giving up their proprietary format and embracing ePub, that it is not feasible to compete against Amazon as a provider of content. Instead, in the case of Sony, they do what they do best: produce high-quality hardware. In addition, with the introduction of the Sony Daily Edition, they have joined with a 3G provider to add additional value to their products.

Digital restrictions management: help or hindrance to the spread of e-books?

Help, because publishers require it to enter the e-book market, and we need the publishers / their content to make e-books successful; hindrance, because honest customers feel cheated and limited in their rights. Eventually, as e-books will move up the maturity curve and publishers won't have a choice but embrace them, DRM will disappear - just as it did for music from the iTunes store - allowing the consumer to be the judge of what's right and what's wrong, a flexibility that DRM couldn't.

Who are the typical e-book users you see in your community? For instance, are they consumers reading fiction or corporate keeping up to date with legislation, policies, technical manuals and training?

MobileRead is an online community where e-book newbies and industry veterans interact and share their experience with e-books and e-book technologies. MobileRead has over four million monthly page views, with half a million uniques every month. We have visitors from any spectrum, from big corporations to retired officers. We have folks from the army who visit our community from Kuwait (turns out that e-book readers are very convenient for them), and we have companies from the publishing industry looking for new ways to expand their electronic offering.

Given that we still lack a choice of devices with larger displays, however, the focus is clearly on consumers reading fiction, where display size is only secondary due to the reflowing nature of its content. To read technical manuals, textbooks and similar content, display technology will need to further improve.