Prognosticating e-books in the new year

It's a mad venture, looking into the future of e-books. Which is why we here at Jacket Copy are letting Sarah Rotman Epps and James McQuivey from Forrester Research carry the ball. They've blogged their 10 predictions for e-books and e-readers at paidContent.org.

Perhaps their most audacious prediction is that e-book sales will top $500 million in 2010. It's audacious because e-book sales from January through September of this year were just over $109 million, according to the Assn. of American Publishers. The researchers say that since this number omits education, libraries and other markets, the sales are actually higher. And that the sales the association does track will also continue to climb.

The two have heartening words for Nook executives at Barnes & Noble; they say the bookseller's challenger to the Kindle and Sony Reader will increase market share in 2010. This is a pretty safe prediction -- pre-orders have sold out the Nook until January, so if there will be a year of the Nook, it certainly won't be 2009.

Several predictions -- about increasing use of non e-readers to read books, and app-ification of e-readers so they can take on more diverse functions -- all point to the same interesting question. A book used to be something simple: pages between covers. But now, it can be almost any collection of words and/or pictures in sequence that's been published, electronically or otherwise. What exactly will define a book at the end of 2010? At the end of 2050?

We're not much for predicting the future here. But maybe you are.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photos: left, the Kindle DX. Credit: Amazon.com. Right: the Nook. Credit Barnes & Noble

The Nook: Barnes & Noble announces its own e-reader

At a news conference in New York this afternoon, Barnes & Noble launched an e-reader set to rival Amazon.com's 2-year-old Kindle. The Nook, as they call it, will retail for $259.

The Barnes & Noble website went live with Nook pages earlier today, which Engadget and other sites quickly posted. After the news conference, it's clear that the Nook is a strong step forward for e-book readers.

What's new and exciting in the Nook:

• It's got a color navigation panel. Not full-color, but it's a start and more than what the other guys have.
• It can be bought in Barnes & Noble's brick-and-mortar stores. Walk into a Barnes & Noble this holiday season and you'll be able not only to ogle, fondle and purchase the Nook, but also use it to browse digital books. That's never been possible with the Kindle.
• It's wireless. The Kindle is too; the Sony Reader hasn't been but will be, they say, come December.
• Nook owners can share: They can lend their books to friends -- anyone with an iPhone, iPod touch, some smartphones and computers with the B&N reader software. No other digital reader has this capacity.
• It's pretty big: 2GB with an expandable 16GB slot.
• It can play MP3s.
• It can read PDFs; the Kindle can't.

What it's not so good at:

• It doesn't have Amazon's text-to-speech feature.
• It's heavier than the Kindle.
• Its 10 days of battery life are fewer than Kindle's 14.

The Wall Street Journal and CNET live-blogged the New York announcement, which included a guest appearance by Malcolm Gladwell. Nook buyers will get a free digital copy of Gladwell's "The Tipping Point." Amazon gave readers a copy of Stephen King's "UR," written specifically for the Kindle, and had King appear to help them debut Kindle 2.0.

According to the Wall Street Journal, William Lynch Jr, president of B&N.com, said, "We support more e-devices than any other e-book retailer." In addition to being able to read PDFs, Barnes & Noble will be the e-bookstore for the new Que e-reader device from Plastic Logic. Moving away from proprietary formats can only benefit the world of e-books. Who wants to buy a digital book for one e-reader only to have to buy it again for a different brand?

Amazon's Kindle has dominated the e-reader market, as the Sony Reader has struggled to find traction. Although we won't know until the holidays are over, it looks as if the Nook may become a serious Kindle competitor.

As for the Nook -- is it a good name? It's kind of cozy, a place you'd go to read. And it does rhyme with "book." But is it catchy? When people ask what that device is, will owners happily say, "A Nook"? 

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The Nook. Credit: Barnes & Noble

Trying to find the literary in the first round of SXSWi panels

South by Southwest Interactive, the wired component of the Texas media conference that famously began with music, then added film, has announced its first batch of panels. They're fascinating -- but they're not particularly bookish. The publishing industry may be going through tremendous upheavals involving technology -- ebooks, the Kindle and its competitors, digital distribution, online marketing -- but those changes may not make many ripples in the greater tech landscape.

That said, there are certainly some smart, tempting panels that are connected to books, through the participants, a discussion of web content or of new ideas about narrative. Here's a brief overview:

Why Keep Blogging? Real Answers for Smart Tweeple. Organized by Emily Gordon, who has been blogging about the New Yorker at Emdashes.com for years, this panel is set to include Scott Rosenberg, author of "Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters" and Ron Hogan, longtime writer at the publishing industry blog Galleycat. 

New Publishing and Web Content. This is organized by Jeffrey Zeldman, web designer and author of "Designing with Web Standards," released in its third edition released today. Zeldman, who began writing his witty, readable design website A List Apart many years ago, is turning his design skills toward words. The panel promises to "explore the creative, strategic and marketing challenges of traditional and new (internet hybrid) book publishing and online magazine publishing."

How the Other Half Lives: Touring the Digital Divide. Set up by Vermont librarian Jessamyn West who blogs at librarian.net, this panel will address questions of the digital divide from the real-world perspective of librarians who confront it daily.

Design Fiction: Props, Prototypes, Predicaments Communicating New Ideas. This panel takes on the forward-thinking idea that fiction and narrative exist in dialog with physical design and communication.

Indirect Collaboration: Collective Creativity on the Web will focus on collaborative design, rather than the perhaps more intuitive collaborative storytelling, but the ideas may cross over.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: SXSW

Mandela and Google at the Frankfurt Book Fair

The Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany is the world's largest, where much publishing business typically gets done. Now in its second day, the fair seems to be smaller than in recent years. With attendance of agents rumored to be down, there seems to be a bit less business being done; that is, unless you listen to dynamic British publisher Jamie Byng, who blogs about the excitement of telling stories all conference long.

There has been news: Today Google announced an online digital bookstore, Google Editions, set to launch mid-2010. The move to sell its own e-books is seen as a step into the territory dominated by Amazon's Kindle reader.

And before the fair had even begun, a hot property was, as they say in publishing, up for auction. Nelson Mandela's personal papers -- a private collection of journals, diaries, speeches, notebooks and letters, some written during the 27 years he was imprisoned at Robben Island -- are to be shaped into a book, tentatively titled "Conversations With Myself." Pan Macmillan secured British rights to publish the book before the fair, and on Wednesday Farrar, Straus and Giroux won American publication rights.

The book's agent, Jonny Geller of Curtis Brown, said, "What is so amazing is that he wrote virtually every day of his life and kept all his notes. He has notebooks from Robben Island which are absolutely packed with his handwriting. ... There's scraps of paper with his notes on leadership." While it's an agent's job to spin, it's hard to imagine a set of personal papers that would be more intriguing. Mandela not only suffered decades in prison, but he also emerged to shepherd a peaceful transition of power in South Africa, one of the most unjustly governed nations in the world.

Mandela's autobiography, "Long Walk to Freedom," has sold 6 million copies worldwide. "Conversations With Myself" is planned to reach bookstores in 2010, when Mandela will turn 92.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Nelson Mandela at his 90th birthday celebration in March 2008. Credit: Kim Ludbrook / EPA

Even Dan Brown can't break the e-book 5% rule

When Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" was released on Sept. 15, Amazon's rankings revealed that Kindle sales outstripped sales of the hardcover. This led some ebook enthusiasts to herald the dawning of a new era. FastCompany asked, "Could Dan Brown's new book be heralding the e-book age?" CNet wrote: "The possibility that the Kindle version of 'The Lost Symbol' -- which follows Brown's wildly popular 'Da Vinci Code' and 'Angels & Demons' -- is outselling hard copies on Amazon could be a monumental moment in the e-book industry."

But it was only a moment, one that lasted less than 48 hours. By the time the week was out, with more than 2 million copies sold in the U.S., Britain and Canada -- breaking the publisher's previous one-week record set by Bill Clinton with "My Life" -- hardcover sales had easily eclipsed sales of the ebook. Of the 2 million copies sold, only 100,000, or 5%, were electronic versions.

Today, spokeswoman Suzanne Herz responded to an e-mail query by Jacket Copy: "Sales remain excellent for 'The Lost Symbol,' " she wrote, "and ebooks account for approximately 5% of all sales."

Ebook sales started slow and as recently as 2007 remained flat, but have been climbing steadily in the years since. The change seems to have been sparked by Amazon's Kindle, which debuted Nov. 19, 2007; the online retailer has made Kindle versions a prominent part of the book-shopping experience. Yet despite occasional dramatic increases, the number of ebooks sold is just 3% to 5% the total number of hardcover books sold. A complicating factor is that not all publishers have been reporting ebook sales, meaning the numbers are still a bit wiggly.

Fans of ebooks are always on the lookout for a magic bullet -- a killer app, a brilliant new device, a groundbreaking title -- to bring them to greater prominence. With the out-of-the-gate Kindle sales of "The Lost Symbol," it looked like they'd found their rocket.

But what it really showed is that some enthusiasts wanted "The Lost Symbol" immediately, and hurried to purchase the electronic version. But they remain just five out of every hundred book buyers.

Looks like even "The Lost Symbol" has not been able to herald the dawning of the ebook age.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty Images

Getting bookishly appy with the iPhone

Lately people have been asking me with excitement what apps I've got on my iPhone, and I shrug and change the subject. It's a phone, it plays music, it gives me directions, it lets me e-mail from as many accounts as I like, allows me to vet the comments on this blog, check Twitter. ... Do I really want it to do anything else?

Well, yes. Budd Parr of Chekhov's Mistress inspired me with his literary iPhone, particularly by shelling out the $49.99 for the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. The price might seem high if you don't know the charms of the Oxford English Dictionary, which goes down paths of usage both historical and linguistic, providing marvelous contextual examples. The full version is 12 CDs for $295, so this condensed version is a bargain, if pricier than most apps.

There are separate apps for many books in the public domain, either as stand-alones, like Bram Stoker's "Dracula," or organized by author, like Jane Austen. But if having a separate app for each book or author seems inefficient -- and it does to me -- you have a choice of several apps that let you download and organize lots of public domain books. One that people seem to like is Classics, which has a luxurious-looking interface, including illustrations, and costs just 99 cents. But so far it includes just 15 books, and while it does have the tragically underread "Flatland," the others are pretty greatest-hits ("The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," "The Call of the Wild").

By contrast, there are 20,000 free books available on the Eucalyptus app (inset, pictured). Its books all have a uniform cover design, with bars of color across the top and bottom and the title in the center on white (reminiscent of Penguin's midcentury covers). Its pages appear to have the texture of high-quality paper, the text appears in paragraph form like it traditionally does in print (paragraphs are indented and flow together, rather than the Web style you see here), and the pages turn beautifully. Through its search, you can download any English-language text from Project Gutenberg, reengineered for the application. It took just seconds to download all of "Swann's Way" by Marcel Proust; after books are downloaded you can access them by author or from a title/author list. At $9.99, it's not cheap, but it's currently a top-20 seller in the books apps section of the iTunes store, so others must have noticed its high-quality interface.

Speaking of high-quality interfaces, I have to turn to Stanza. 

Sony's new e-reader to go off-leash

Today Sony unveiled a new e-reader that will do something Sony's earlier readers cant: go wireless. The Daily Edition, above right, has a 7-inch screen, can hold up to 1,000 books and can be read either vertically or tipped horizontally to mimic the two pages of an open book. The Daily Edition will be available in December for holiday shoppers for about $399.

The Daily Edition will use AT&T's 3G mobile broadband technology (just like the iPhone) which it can use for downloading new books. Amazon's Kindle, which has made tremendous headway in the marketplace, is already wireless.

How do the Kindle and Sony e-readers match up? Pricewise, the cheapest is Sony's pocket edition -- announced earlier this month -- selling for $199. That's less than the slightly larger 6-inch editions -- Amazon's Kindle 2.0 and Sony's e-reader -- which both go for $299. And the upcoming Sony Daily edition is $399, not quite as much -- or as large -- as the $489 Kindle DX.

Interestingly, Sony has made a point of embracing the EPUB format, which can be read by a variety of readers -- whereas books bought for Kindle can only be read on a Kindle. Patrick Brown, Director of Internet Marketing for Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena explains this way. "The EPUB is one that certain people want to be the industry standard, like an MP3," he said this morning. "More or less, everybody else is moving towards an open format -- which has more vendors that can sell into it, and more devices that the end user can choose from -- while Amazon is standing by itself with its proprietary format."

Not that Brown is entirely unbiased -- he works for Vroman's, which, with Denver's Tattered Cover and other independent bookstores, will offer the EPUB ebooks for sale on their websites beginning in September. So a Sony reader owner could purchase an ebook -- say, Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" -- online from an independent bookstore, just as Kindle owners can do from Amazon.

Although Sony's reader debuted before Amazon's, in some ways it's still playing second fiddle to the online bookseller, which has been able to promote its Kindle directly to its websites' book buyers. How Sony's latest volley will play remains to be seen.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Sony

Recent and related:

Supersize! Amazon unveils Kindle DX in New York

Hello cutie! Sony's new pocket e-reader

Will an Apple Tablet rival the Kindle?

An 'Antiques Roadshow' for books?

Take the scene above -- from a North Carolina episode of the PBS television program "Antiques Roadshow" -- and replace all those jade objects with books. Just books.

That's an idea being bandied about by the British Booksellers and Publishers Assns. It's tangentially connected to a larger, not-entirely-popular initiative in the works tentatively called Bookaholism, which will  attempt to create a recognizable Bookaholic brand for all British booksellers. How good (or lousy) an idea this may be is beyond me. Mostly because I am just too excited about the idea of an all-books "Antiques Roadshow." Which is, admittedly, just an idea.

It's not that "Antiques Roadshow" doesn't already do books. There was a signed 1891 copy of Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (worth $8,000 to $12,000) in Reno, Nev. The first edition of  "Anne of Green Gables" found in Providence, R.I., worth $12,000 to $18,000. "Roll, Jordan, Roll" from Memphis was full of high-end photogravures worth $15,000 to $20,000.

As much as I love the show's furniture, glassware and memorabilia, I admit I'd be thrilled to watch an all-books version. Call me a bookaholic if you must.

But these values illuminate something: What makes a book a book is still more than its content. "Anne of Green Gables" would be as beloved in an e-book version -- but would it fetch more than $10,000? Apparently we value holding a book in our hands that Oscar Wilde once held in his. Will an e-book ever of bring us that kind of resonance?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: "Antiques Roadshow." Credit: Jeff Dunn / Associated Press

Dan Brown fans won't have to wait for ebook

Dan Brown's publisher, Doubleday, which had originally implied that an ebook of Brown's "The Lost Symbol" would be released after the hardcover's arrival, announced yesterday that the electronic version of the book would hit cyber-shelves on the same day that physical book appears in bookstores, on Sept. 15.

There are more than 80 million copies of Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" in print worldwide; "The Lost Symbol," a follow-up, also features protagonist Robert Langdon, noted Harvard symbologist.

Will readers snap up copies of the new book after a six-year break? The publisher certainly hopes so. Its original print run was said to be a mammoth 6.5 million copies. That's paper versions of the book only -- there won't be any advance tallies of ebooks.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Leonardo Da Vinci's painting of the Mona Lisa. Credit: Jean-Pierre Muller / AFP / Getty Images

Hello, cutie! New Sony e-reader scores on style

Yesterday Sony announced a new bargain e-reader: Just $199, it'll be among the cheapest e-book readers around when it hits stores later this month. But it doesn't look cheap -- in fact, it's really cute!

Called the Sony Reader Pocket Edition, it's got a 5-inch display and comes in three colors -- traditional silver, cool blue and, yes, super-cute pink. There's a click wheel, like an old-style iPhone, and control buttons up the right edge.

Did I mention that it comes in pink?

Perhaps the kind of case you're holding when looking at the screen of an e-reader shouldn't matter. After all, a true reader gets lost in the words, whether on a screen or a page. Who notices the boundaries of the page? Does the case holding the screen make that much difference?

But to me, the tactile experience of reading is relevant. So much so that I haven't invested in an e-reader yet -- I like the look and feel of classic paper books. And if the physical experience of holding and reading a book is relevant, the design of an e-reader makes a difference.

OK, style isn't everything. Unlike the Kindle, the Sony device needs to be physically connected to a computer to download, and people used to the Kindle's massive capacity may be dismayed by the Pocket Edition's 350-book limit. To address the later problem, Sony will offer an updated, higher-capacity touchscreen reader with slots for memory sticks or SD cards. But you'll still need that cable.

Yet there are a few upsides. Sony has dropped its e-book prices to $9.99-$11.99, and its devices can read 1 million free public domain books available through the Google Books Project.

Plus, I have to let you know: The new touch-screen comes in two colors -- black and red.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photos: Sony