Right here, right now, there is no other place I want to be,
Right here, right now, watching the world wake up from history.
– Jesus Jones (audio)
The NY Times has an update on e-Books today. The International Digital Publishing Forum, a trade group for sellers of electronic books, estimates that retail sales of e-books grew to $8.1 million in the second quarter of 2007, up from $4 million a year earlier.
It is hard to beat Sony’s $300 Reader, a thin nine-ounce tablet comes with a high-resolution black-and-white screen that uses little power, prolonging its battery life. The bright virtual pages, along with other advantages like weight, capacity and a built-in reading light, are gradually drawing readers. Sony’s ebooks.connect.com, sells content.
Many people install several readers so they have at least one that matches the format of the book they want to read. There are also open source packages like Plucker (plkr.org) available free. Many cellphones and personal digital assistants have screens with a resolution fine enough to rival that of the printed page.
Mobipocket.com, a French company owned by Amazon.com, and eReader.com, a division of Motricity, distribute two of the most popular applications. But there are many options. Fictionwise.com, a bookseller that supports many formats, sells some new novels as multiformat packages that let users choose among 10 readers from companies like Microsoft, Franklin or Adobe.
Adobe distributes a PDF reader for most major platforms, including cellphones, which runs the Symbian OS. Apple’s iPhone can’t store your own files (yet), so there’s no way to access the books except over the network.
Free content can be found on sites that collect older books no longer protected by copyright and newer books released with licenses that encourage open sharing, like those from the Creative Commons. Project Gutenberg’s Web site has ebooks in plain text, HTML and Plucker. Manybooks.net offers many of the same books in a wider array of formats.
Each $100 Laptop could contain the Library of Alexandria. With WikiBooks. Right here. Right now.
