Tag archive: e-readers

Is My Sony E-Reader Doomed?

If I truly knew the answer to that I’d be a rich stock investor and not a writer with a day job, but this article makes me wonder if sometime in the next couple of years there might be a great opportunity to short Sony stock.

For those of you who have a life and don’t have time for the article: the salient prediction is that Amazon and the Kindle will move from 50% e-book market share to 90% market share.

This is because Amazon wisely treated Kindle as a platform rather than a device.  You can download Kindle for free to everything from your Blackberry to your PC and then buy your e-books from Amazon.

Remember all those predictions about i-pad being a Kindle killer?  Most people now use the Kindle app to read books on their i-pads, which means they’re buying e-books from Amazon instead of the i-bookstore.

I still use my Sony E-Reader, but I remember beta VCRs and I wonder if one day one of my kids will find a dusty Reader sitting on a shelf and say, “Hey Dad, what’s this thing?”

What I Wrote for The Crime Writers of Canada

E-readers: A Fad or the Future?

Way back in 1994, a CBC television producer told a researcher I was dating that the internet was just a fad like CB radios.  If she wanted to build a web page for the show, she’d have to do it on her own time.  Oops.

The producer can be forgiven this assessment of the internet because he was confusing a device, a radio, with a new and highly versatile medium of expression.  C.B. radios had only one purpose, and no one could use them for advertising.  He was also probably thinking about that eight-track tape player gathering dust in his basement.

E-books are the new must-have gadget, and they are everywhere.  Last week the new color version of Barnes and Noble’s Nook reader launched.  They’ve sold over a million of the old (so last year) black and white version, and they expect to sell a million of the color Nook over the next year.  Combine that just with Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony e-reader and you’ve got a lot of consumers looking for content for their new toys.  Let’s not even get into the tablets like the i-pad.  Avid readers can also get apps for their smart phones that’ll allow them to purchase e-books, so every Blackberry, Apple i-phone or any phone with Google’s Android operating system is a potential e-reader.

But I’m sure some authors and publishers are still thinking about all those eight-track tape players or their Beta VCRs.

They should think again.  E-readers are evolving platforms for expression.  Cookbooks will be able to insert how-to videos, and advertisers can find nooks (pun intended) and crannies to sneak in their less than subtle messages.  People can find new ways to make money.

More importantly, like the internet, e-book readers are going to enable content providers and facilitators to appear from unexpected places.  Who’d ever heard of Google, E-bay, Wikipedia, Facebook or even Craigslist in 1994?

E-readers are going to allow small publishers to distribute electronic downloads on an equal footing with big publishers.  No trucks required.  No expensive warehouses.  There will be price wars, content wars and jostling for attention.

I don’t predict the imminent death of the hardcover or paperback because some people still like to show how smart they are by what’s on their bookshelf.  But like the newspapers, big publishers are going to have to get used to slumping sales of paper books–sales that never recover to the glory days of the twentieth century and fade with the boomers.

Yet e-readers may be good for writers.  There’s opportunity for creativity, a new and (for now) more egalitarian platform from which to sell your words.  It’s exciting.  I’ll go out on a limb and say that it’s the future.  You heard it here first.

By the way, I married the researcher.

Mike’s Note:

The Crime Writers of Canada asked me for an article on e-books for their newsletter.  The article I wrote above turned out to be very similar to one they’d published last month.  Who knew?  I’m not the first person to see this coming.

I slashed off a different article for the newsletter, but above is what those Crime Writers would have read if they hadn’t aleady read it somewhere else.

Millions of Nooks Means More E-books

The game is changing so fast.

Barnes and Noble came out with their colour (that’s color for Americans) version of the Nook last week, and it’ll sell for $10 less than last year’s nook.  I’m betting graphic novel  and children’s book authors are going to be happy.

Now this isn’t a tablet like the ipad.  It’s a dedicated e-reader even though it has some extra bling like very fast web browsing.

What’s really amazing is that Barnes and Noble have already sold a million of the old version of the Nook and expect to sell a million of this version.

By New Year’s there are going to be literally millions of people with e-readers looking for content.  What an opportunity!

The downside is I haven’t found a way to sell through B&N yet, but I’m looking.  As traditional book retailers get more and more like Amazon, I’m willing to bet they open their distribution up too.

Must edit faster.  Must write faster.