With devices like Amazon’s Kindle skyrocketing in popularity, e-ooks are quickly becoming a more viable way to read. But, unlike traditional paper books, the New York Times doesn’t recognize e-books on its popular bestseller lust. That’s soon going to change. Starting early next year, the Times will begin tracking both fiction and non-fiction e-book sales.
“The vibrant growth of digital publishing has created a need for an impartial, reliable source for tracking and reporting the top-selling [e-books] across the country,” said the Times’ Janet Elder. “The Times is a trusted brand within the book publishing industry and with consumers.”
The new list will be comprised of data from a number of different online book sellers, which will then be verified and aggregated.
When will books benefit from the addition of multimedia magic? Narnia may hold the answer.
HarperCollins has released an enhanced e-book for C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in advance of the film adaptation of the same. The book is a perfect test case for the promises and flaws of the enhanced e-book market.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader isn’t an app, but a multimedia EPUB book. EPUB is as close as we have to a universal e-book standard. This immediately makes it multi-platform and multi-device — no need for separate iOS or Android code, or store approval. All you need is an application on those platforms that can read EPUB, and a touchscreen. EPUB books can’t be read on the Kindle, but the Kindle isn’t a multimedia touchscreen device either, so that’s no loss anyways.
Sometimes, enhancing e-books with multimedia seems like a solution in search of a problem. Generally, readers aren’t clamoring for enhanced books. Writers and publishers don’t always understand them, and there isn’t always good content to put in them.
Lewis’s Narnia books are different. They have a well-established readership and are broadly popular with both adults and children. They’ve already gone transmedia, spinning off games and movies; the writer’s estate is willing to develop and authorize new media, and companies like HarperCollins and Disney have the tools and incentives to develop them. The serial nature of the books, in turn, gives the books continuity and room to evolve.
What’s more, the visually rich and conceptually encyclopedic nature of the books means that adding maps, illustrations, animations, reference guides, and timelines actually become very useful reading aids. Add in audio readings and commentaries, critical essays, and you have something that could become the equivalent of a deluxe DVD edition of a beloved book.
Really, the deluxe DVD editions of The Lord of the Rings were enhanced e-books without us fully realizing it — at least those portions devoted to author JRR Tolkien, the writing of the books and the world of Middle Earth. That’s the standard against which we should judge enhanced e-books.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader doesn’t quite get there. I reviewed the iBooks version, which costs $10, $2 more than the $8 “non-enhanced” version. It gets the Pauline Baynes maps and illustrations, animation and reference encyclopedia right. This material alone is worth the extra $2.
But a promising “read along” feature, using audio from Shakespearean actor/audiobook standout Derek Jacobi’s reading of the book, is hopelessly crippled, providing just the first few paragraphs of each chapter. If you want to hear the whole thing, you’ll need to buy the separate audiobook, which costs another $17 from iTunes. Putting snippets of audio in the e-book feels like a terrible tease.
Again and again, enhanced e-books bump up against rights that have already been sold and assigned. The video content, including an animated timeline/summary of the story, is solid, but considering the e-book is intended as a cross-promotion with the film, it’s sad that it doesn’t even include previews from the film.
It’s a worthwhile object for what it is. But it’s ultimately frustrating, because the potential for an integrated object on video-capable e-readers like the iPad and Nook Color is so clear, at least to me.
The publishing industry, though, is so knotted — the media streams so legally and functionally fragmented — that the opportunities for a clear case study, an example that everyone can point to as a standard, get squandered again and again.
The New York Times has dropped some PR on us this morning, making an official announcement that it will begin to publish a bestseller list for e-books in early 2011. The current NYT bestseller lists — which are divided into several categories — are considered by many to be the definitive metric for a book’s success. The Times will have two separate lists covering fiction and non-fiction when it launches, drawing on information from various retailers, and will be independently verified by third party company RoyaltyShare. The list will appear in both the print and online editions of the paper. The full press release is below
We’ll rarely be accused of being proper economists here, but we do have to question Hanvon’s calculations in throwing up a pre-order price for its brand new color e-reader of 3,500 Chinese Yuan. That’s the report coming out of DigiTimes this morning, placing the device at around the $530 mark in a market that’s not exactly known for its rampant consumption of tech luxuries. Then again, what we’re talking about here will indeed be the very first E Ink Triton-equipped device anywhere once deliveries commence in February, so there’s the cachet of short-term exclusivity to look forward to. Or it might be very long-term exclusivity if nobody thinks that color is worth paying that massive premium over more conventional e-readers. We shall wait and see.
Competition is good, let’s officially welcome LG to the burgeoning color electronic paper market. The company is diving right in with not one but two color prototype displays that it showed off at FPD International in Japan. Both are 9.7-inches diagonal, the first being fully color with an 800 x 600 resolution — which just happens to exactly match the specs of E Ink’s latest. The second, however, is only partly color, the top three quarters being monochrome with a 1200 x 1200 resolution, augmented by a 200 x 600 color strip at the bottom. It’s an interesting offering, a layout not unlike the Nook but all on a single display. No word on price or availability, but you can see them doing their thing, along with E Ink’s latest, in the video below.
There’s no denying that e-books are already big business, and market research firm Forrester is now offering some pretty impressive numbers that show just how big it already is, and how much bigger it will get in the next few years. The firm surveyed some 4,000 people and found that while just seven percent of those actually read e-books, they still bought enough of them to translate to $966 million in sales this year — a number that’s projected to grow to $3 billion by 2015. As for the reading habits of that seven percent, Forrester found that they “read the most books and spend the most money on books,” and that they read 41 percent of their books in digital form. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they use actual e-readers, though — a full 35 percent apparently do most of their e-book reading on a laptop, followed by 32 percent on a Kindle, 15 percent on an iPhone, 12 percent on a Sony e-reader, and ten percent on a netbook. Interestingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, Kindle users seem to be the biggest boosters of e-books — they do 66 percent of all their reading in digital form.
E Ink Triton. That’s the name we should all start getting used to as E Ink Holdings has just officially announced its first color electronic paper display. It was only yesterday that we learned Hanvon would be the first to bring the newly colorized e-reading panels to the market, so today the eponymous E Ink display maker has seen fit to dish out its own press release, catchy title, and even a handy explanatory video. The key points are that the new Triton stuff will offer 20 percent faster performance, sunlight-readable imaging, and up to a month’s battery life. That would suggest there’s almost no sacrifice in endurance relative to E Ink’s monochromatic screens already on offer in things like Amazon’s Kindle, which sounds all kinds of righteous to us. Skip past the break to get better acquainted with the Triton.
Magazine and newspaper publishers are about to get a larger piece of the Kindle pie — 70 percent, to be exact. That’s what Amazon’s now offering, in an effort that’s clearly aimed to attract more periodicals to the service. Only catch is, all versions of the periodical have to work for all version of Kindle, in all geographical regions where the publishers has the rights to distribute — a small price to pay, especially since it keeps the customer base pretty wide open. Interested parties, you probably already know where to look.
Just a couple of months after Sony refreshed its longstanding Reader Daily Edition, that very product is now shipping to the masses. ‘Course, you’re probably laser-focused on Hanvon’s new color E Ink device on tap for next March, but if you just can’t wait for that bad boy — and you’re not interested in any of the LCD-based alternatives — the PRS-950SC is now available in stores and through SonyStyle. As a refresher, this guy’s got a 7-inch touchscreen, WiFi and 3G, a spartan web browser and 2GB of integrated storage space. All yours for a buck under $300.
We’ve seen color e-readers before, even colored e-paper displays. But in 2011, Chinese e-reader maker Hanvon will ship the first color reader with a screen made by Cambridge’s E Ink themselves.
According to the New York Times, Hanvon will announce their new e-reader at Tuesday’s FPD International 2010 trade show in Tokyo. Sporting a 9.68-inch color touch screen, Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity, it will retail in China in March 2011 for about $440.
The reader uses a standard E Ink screen with a color filter, so it has the same low-power, lightweight, high-readability characteristics of its black-and-white cousins. But this also means the screen is more-or-less static: it can show color photographs, illustrations and possibly some animation, but not full-motion video. Without a power-hungry backlight, the colors won’t be as bright as an LCD screen either.
Other features of the device remain unclear. Hanvon is known for its handwriting technology, which it packages with some but not all of its e-readers; the NYT is silent on whether the new device includes it. Business users, who are the device’s target market, are often more receptive to a stylus interface than the general consumer market; introducing color could make a stylus appealing to illustrators as well.
The long-term trajectory of color e-paper displays is even less clear, even as more-capable products from E Ink, Mirasol and Pixel QI come to the market. Color plays a different role in reading than it does in video or gaming. Will color illustrations be enough to satisfy readers, or will they drift towards LCD screens and tablets?
The short version is that consumers want everything: vibrant color and full video with low power consumption and zero glare at an unbeatable price. Until that arrives, we’ll continue to see both makers and readers in this space accepting tradeoffs and experimenting to find a balance that works.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
