The eBook Market Is Heating Up

It all started, more or less, with Amazon’s Kindle. Sure everyone hated the first Kindle’s design but the idea was a hit. Then we saw eBook readers being brought out by companies big and small. Not all of them need mentioning because they were and are very similar to each other. Noteworthy amongst them is Sony though, who does not have a book-selling platform like Amazon to back its devices up. But they have well built devices anyway.

Now we have the Barne’s&Noble’s Nook ebook reader. Once again, we have a company who is banking on the fact that they have a lot of content to sell to the device owners and some exclusive content too. Their ebook reader is also refreshingly different from the Kindle with its dual screen and Android-driven full color LCD touchscreen interface.

The Nook is actually made by a company called Plastic Logic, who themselves have a device in the market called Cool-r and a new one called Que is supposedly making its way to us early next year.

A company called Spring Design has made a prototype of an Android-running ebook reader called Alex that is very similar to the Nook but is more flexible and differs at a few key points. We also have an ebook cum netbook that also runs on Android, called eDGe, from a company called enTourage. Their reader screen is Wacom Penabled, which lets it accept stylus input directly on the screen like a tablet. So you can doodle and write on the screen and saving it has journals.

Google in the meantime is planning something called ‘Google Edition’. It is an ebook store that is looking to take on Amazon and perhaps the B&N store as well. The massive book digitization project that Google has undertaken is quite well known by now and we all know that Google has been facing some pretty stiff opposition. But so far, it seems like they will get out most of what they are trying to do.

And a quite mention should be made of projects like the Microsoft Courier, Apple’s tablet device, Asus’ dual screen ebook reader, etc. Projects that are rumored but are far from being publicly announced. Amongst them, Apple is the only one who seems to have a direct connection with the world of print media.

Thus, the electronic book market is abuzz with activity and anticipation right now. Those who thought that efforts in this direction would bear no fruit, stand corrected now. You might’ve had a few doubts about the demand of such content a few years back but with the onset and penetration of mobile broadband and better handheld devices, this is becoming quite the business.

And it is understandable that the print industry will hold on to anything they can to keep itself profitable. Now that everyone gets their news, tv guides, comics and every other print content online, only a handful continue to buy actual printed content.

However, it has to be understood at this point that, contrary to popular belief, consumers have not lost interest in print media. It instead has to do with the immediacy and convenience of getting such content. Let’s take news for example – Social networks like twitter do a much better job of reporting live events of any scale than any other media, online or otherwise. This is especially true for things that are happening at local, even neighborhood level. So why wait till the next morning to find out? Why even wait for the TV news to get to the sight when live witnesses are streaming information in real-time?

But people do like reading books and that is true for every generation. Or else books like Harry Potter, Eragon, Artemis Fowl, Twilight, etc. would not be the best sellers they are. The fact that some of them have been made in to movies shows that they are popular enough to be profited from. The Golden Compass (onscreen adaption of Northern Lights from the His dark Materials trilogy) would make a good example, so would the Chronicles of Narnia movies.

Hence, intelligent and forward-looking companies and publishers are all looking to capitalize on the boom in handheld devices. They are making money by making it as easy as possible for the consumer to get the content he wants. For the consumer, thus, things just keep on getting better and better. Given human nature, we wouldn’t have it any other way.