Infographic: Books vs. eBooks – Stephen’s Lighthouse.

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Infographic: Books vs. eBooks

via xkcd: Book Burning.

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xkcd: Book Burning

I’m excited about digital books for a number of reasons. Their proclivity towards multimedia is not one of them. I’m excited about digital books for their meta potential.

via Embracing the digital book — Craig Mod.

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An interesting essay about some ebook problems and potentials

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Borders Australia to start selling ebooks and readers.

I can’t decide whether I love this or hate it.

[via walkingpaper]

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PhoneBook

Aya Karpinska has written a series of illustrated short stories for children that are designed to be read on an iPhone and take advantage of the zoom and panning functions. Great idea. If you don’t have an iPhone, you can watch a demo video or view an in-browser version.

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Children’s stories written for the iPhone

Back in the days before ReadingHacks.com existed, I suggested that the Amazon Kindle might turn out to be the tipping point for ebooks. By this I meant that having the backing of a well established bookstore like Amazon might make ebooks a bigger deal in the mainstream. My biggest concern has always been the cost. How many people are going to pay $400 for a device specifically to read ebooks?

If you have been living under a rock for the last little while, you may have missed all the hype about Apple’s new 3G iPhone. I had thought the Kindle would be a big deal because it had the backing of a big bookseller. I now wonder if the iPhone is going to do even more for ebooks for three reasons:

1. It has a whole lot of hype and excitement already associated with it. People are excited about anything it can do just because it’s being done on an iPhone. It doesn’t matter if plenty of other phones have been used for email, the fact that the iPhone does it it special. Partly marketing and hype, and partly the fact that Apple tend to do things well.
2. A large number of people are going to buy one anyway. Why fork out $400 for a Kindle when you already have an iPhone that does a pretty good job of reading ebooks itself?
3. iPhone is pretty. Kindle is beige.

Along the same lines, Silicon Valley Insider also think the iPhone is bad news for Kindle. Although they suggest the benefits of Kindle when compared with iPhone might be screen size, battery life and the ability to easily download books. I suspect the book availablity issue will work out with people like eReader.com even if Amazon won’t support other platforms. As for a bigger screen and better battery life, sure they’d both be nice but whether they make is worth having a second expensive device is another question.

If you want to read more opinions about this, plug the words “iphone” and “ebooks” into your search engine of choice, you’ll find plenty to read. Or even easier, here a handful of articles I have come across in my travels over the last couple of days:

Before the latest hype about the 3G iPhone, ReadWriteWeb had already asked the question Is the iPhone the ultimate ebook reader?

More recently, Carolyn Kellog over at the LA Times has blogged briefly about her experience reading ebooks on her new iPhone.

BoingBoing have reported that some people have grabbed freely available public domain ebooks and started selling them on the Apple App store for 99 cents a pop.

eReader.com struggled to handle all the new iPhone 3G users downloading ebooks they had previously purchased and wanted to load onto their shiny new toys.

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eBooks on the iPhone

A while ago, Neil Gaiman’s publishers made his wonderful book American Gods available as a free ebook for a limited time. They have now collated sales figures for the period of the promotion and sales were up during that time. Read Gaiman’s own comments about this.

On the same topic, Cory Doctorow is a big fan of making his books freely available as ebooks and has a good explanation, part of which is because it drives hard copy sales. I particularly like his comment that obscurity is a far greater danger for writers than piracy.

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Free ebooks can increase sales of hard copies, just ask Neil Gaiman

Wondering where to get your hands on some free ebooks for your shiny new Amazon Kindle?

Gizo recently pointed me at the post Free books for your amazon kindle, over at 43folders.

I have not had a chance to explore the sites listed in the article but will certainly report back when I do.

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Free Kindle books

Nick Hornby has written his thoughts on ebooks at the Penguin blog.

He makes some points that are fairly obvious and have been talked about plenty of times – like the high cost of an ebook reader, and the fact that people are quite attached to physical books in a way they were never attached to CDs.

He does make a couple of points that I have not seen much discussion about, concerning comparisons between the success of mp3 players and the potential growth of ebook readers.

First, when people buy their first mp3 player, they probably already have a considerable collection of CDs that can be added to the player immediately. People can’t do this with books they already own in hard copy. Sure they can download free copies of many public domain titles, but that won’t include the majority of titles on most people’s shelves.

The other point he makes is simply that people don’t read that much. Fair point. The benefit of buying a device for several hundred dollars so you can carry around lots and lots of books is limited if you don’t read lots and lots of books. Across the population, people do more music listening than reading.

He makes fair points, but I still believe the ebook industry will continue to grow. It’s not going to be an overnight thing where we all stop buying paper books overnight, but gradually the ebook market will grow. I actually wonder if there is more potential in non-fiction and text books than fiction.

I have said before that Amazon getting in on the act with the Kindle is a big deal for the format and I still believe that. It might not be a runaway success and it is still too expensive, but I think it is a big deal. Personally though, I am unlikely to get right into it until reader prices drop (my Treo screen still feels too small) and my library starts lending ebooks.

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Nick Hornby on ebooks