The Kindle 2 week - part 1: David Pouge and the final battle

Amazon.com released last week Kindle 2, the new version of its e-book reader. Given Amazon's growing role in the book market and the influence Kindle has on this market, we decided to try and bring you a couple of interesting and hopefully unique perspectives about the new Kindle.

So for the next seven days, we will bring you each day a little Kindle piece. Hopefully by next Thursday we will have a better understanding of the big Kindle picture.

On the first part we invite you to get to watch this video, where David Pouge, the New York Times technology columnist, reviews the new Kindle 2 e-reader and wonders if e-books will make physical books obsolete. He gets an e-book and a paper book into an imaginary bottle you have to watch - it makes some very good points and it's also very funny. You're also welcome to read his column "The Kindle: Good Before, Better Now".



Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris
www.ecolibris.net

Random House is offering 7,000 more titles in digital format

More and more books are available as e-books and that's not really big news anymore. But big publishers that significantly increase the availability of their books in digital form, or like Treehugger call them "hot for e-books", still is. Especially when it's the biggest one - Random House.

Yes, PhysOrg is reporting today that Random House, the world's largest English-language general trade book publisher, announced that it was making thousands of additional books available in digital form, including novels by John Updike and Harlan Coben, as well as several volumes of the "Magic Treehouse" children's series.

The publisher is almost doubling the books they have in electronic format - from more than 8,000 to nearly 15,000. I believe that this move is in accordance with Random House's increased e-books sales (according to their vice president for digital operations, Matt Shatz, sales have increased by triple digit percentages in 2008), as well as with their willingness to diversify their platform and provide more options to readers.

As their VP for digital operations reported much of the significant increase in e-book sales are thanks to Amazon.com’s Kindle reader. I wonder how the current economic will influence the sales of e-books in the next couple of month. My guesstimation is that we'll see very little growth with e-books sales because of the Kindle's relatively high price. Still, it's cheaper to buy an e-book than a book and therefore I think we'll still see sales growing and not decreasing.

All in all we shouldn't forget that we're still talking about a niche with market share of about 1% of the whole book sales market.

And what about the green aspect of this move? will thousands of additional books available in digital form be better the environment or not? well, e-books don’t need paper and therefore no trees are cut down which is a good thing. They don’t need transportation or physical storage and therefore no extra costs and extra footprint are required to bring the book from the publisher to the reader. Yet, other factors to be considered, especially with regards to e-book readers such as their production, materials used, energy required for the reader’s use, and how recyclable they are.

So what’s the verdict? We still don’t know as we’re lacking a full life-cycle assessment of reading e-books using kindle or other similar electronic book readers. Until we have that, we can’t really tell for sure if and to what extent e-books, including the new 7,000 Random House titles, are more environmentally-friendly in comparison to paper made books.

More links on e-books:

E-books vs. paper books - resources page on Eco-Libris website

eBooks - A Greener Choice or Not?

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Plant a tree for every book you read!

How Do you Say "Sustainable Reading" in Chinese?

Martin Daniels of The Booksellers Association brings us this story about an interesting business model coming all the way from Shanghai, which allows book readers to get their books for free by allowing sponsors to plant advertisings in the pages. Sounds familiar? No wonder, this is more or less the business model that keeps most of the content on the internet free, and many free magazines floating. Only this time we're talking printed books. Yep, it's time for China to teach us something about innovative business ideas, and BookGG may be just the first of many.

So how does this work? Martin Daniels explains:

"The consumer selects the book and then selects the sponsors with their placement on your book until the price of the book drops to zero. The book is then printed and posted.

For every free book, you need to have a book ticket, which you get once you have registered. You then earn further book tickets by referring new users or orders or buying into an account, which will issue new tickets every month.

Every advertising sponsor can only be selected by an individual once so promoting you to spread your sponsors and in effect find out about others. The sponsor receives all personal information.

Finally the books are printed on demand by Bookgg and contain your sponsors adverts."


So although I personally don't relish the idea of flipping through my new book while being annoyed by ads, I do believe that I would go for it to get a very expensive book I really want for half the price. And frankly I don't mind my purchases being sponsored, especially when I can choose the sponsor, and if sponsors are categorized for me with some conscious labels such as "fair-trade" and "organic".

But what most appeals to me from a Sustainable Reading point of view is the fact, that a successful venture like this in the west can also help popularize print-on-demand technology, which is apparently already quite popular in oh so unsustainable, or so they say, China.

So let's wait and see, shall we?

Best,
Eylon @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for every book you read!

The future of e-books

Have you have read an electronic book? I haven't.. I'm not the type of person who will read a book from his cell phone or those other small gadgets that you can download books to. I guess that I'm, like most people, waiting for an e-book reader that will be user-friendly and affordable. So far there were none, but according to an article yesterday on the New York Times (Are Books Passe? Web giants envision the next chapter), significant advances are on the way and maybe faster than we think.

The main progress is made by Amazon.com that according to the article will unveil in October their new e-book reader. The new device won't be that affordable - it will be priced at $400 to $500. Yet, it is going to be wirelessly connected (but only to Amazon's e-book store of course), which is a big improvement in comparison with older e-book devices that had to be connected to the computer in order to download books or articles.

The article is trying to figure out if we're on the verge of a significant breakthrough in electronic books, which seemed very promising a while ago, but eventually had a very disappointing history. Overall, according to the article, there's a reason to be optimistic this time, but we still have a long way ahead of us until the e-book will become common.

Eco-Libris supports the concept of e-books as a sustainable alternative to books made of paper. Yet, we know it can take many years until e-books will be available for everyone. In the meantime we call all book lovers not to sit aside and wait, but to take an action and plant a tree for every book they read.

Raz