A few weeks ago, Pasquale Castaldo was waiting at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport for a delayed flight, when a man sitting across from him pulled out an Amazon Kindle book-reading device.
“Gee, maybe I should think about e-books myself,” Castaldo thought. He didn’t have a Kindle, but he did have a BlackBerry. He pulled it out and looked for available applications. Sure enough, Barnes & Noble Inc. had just put up an e-reading program. Castaldo, 54, downloaded it, and within a minute, began reading Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”
As others are also discovering, the Connecticut banker found e-books quite accessible without a Kindle.
“The BlackBerry is always with me,” Castaldo said. “Rather than just sitting there, if I can fill that time by reading a good book, I might do that, in addition to doing the other things I might do, like reading e-mail and Twittering.”
Thanks to Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle, e-book sales are finally zooming, after more than a decade in the doldrums. But the pioneering device may not dominate the market for long. As Castaldo found, many phones are now sophisticated enough, and have good enough screens, to be used as e-book reading devices. In addition, e-book reading on computers is already surprisingly popular.
While other digital media like CDs, DVDs and MP3 songs showed sharp growth rates from the get-go, e-books have puttered around as a tiny fraction of overall book sales for more than a decade. In several periods, sales actually declined from year to year as publishers wavered in their commitment and interest.
The technology has also faced unique resistance from consumers because printed books work so well.
The most well-known dedicated reading devices, the Kindle and Sony Corp.’s Reader, try to emulate the look of the printed page with a display technology known as “electronic ink.”
While many find the result pleasant to read, e-ink also imposes significant limitations on the devices. They can’t be backlit like other screens. They can’t show colour. They’re also slow to update, making them difficult to use for Web browsing or other computer activities.
The Kindle has a wireless connection directly to Amazon’s store, meaning users can buy and download books to the device within minutes; much like Castaldo could do on his smart phone. The Reader lacks a wireless capability and thus needs to be connected to a computer to load books.
Amazon isn’t betting solely on the Kindle. It released an iPhone app for the Kindle store in March. It has snapped up some other developers of book-reading applications for smart phones, but these programs don’t use the Kindle store.
According to a survey of 2,600 adults by research firm Simba Information this spring, the most common way to read e-books is on another general-purpose device: the personal computer. It found that 8 per cent of adults had bought an e-book last year, a high figure considering that Kindle sales were less than half a percent of the adult population.
Bob LiVolsi, the founder and CEO of independent e-book retailer BooksOnBoard, said two-thirds of his customers read their books on their PCs. Romance, thriller and mystery titles costing $5 to $7 are the big draw for his customers, who aren’t high earners and have trouble justifying the cost of a dedicated device.
Though adoption has been slow, PCs have had a big head start in e-books, said Michael Norris, senior publishing analyst at Simba. Their ubiquity also means they provide some camouflage to avid readers who want to “read a romance novel at work while pretending to work,” he said.
