Trapdoor Books

It’s Not Always About the Kindle

Posted on 07. Jul, 2009 by Chris Matney in Book Publishing, Front Page Posts

One of my readers asked why I’m so fascinated with the Kindle. The short answer is: I have one. But, to be fair, it is more about the concept of an e-book reader than the actual piece of plastic and glass. Right now, Kindle is the proverbial 500 pound gorilla, so it seems to be garnering a bulk of the media attention. That said, here are some interesting bits about other e-book readers out there. Here is a complete list from Wikipedia. BTW, Trapdoor Books will support all reading platforms – paper, electronic, neural shunts (they are coming). Our focus is on providing you good content in whatever format you wish to consume it.

Coolreaders Cool-er got a review in Wired last week. This is the budget e-book reader at $250. The reviewer listed the trade-offs in functionality, although these are all pretty minor except for the lack of wireless downloads on Cool-er. From a publisher’s perspective, the interesting thing is the device has access to only about 5000 titles (compared to 300,000 for Amazon and 100,000 for Sony), and the cost of each book averages $17 instead of $10. With Kindle 2 prices going down $60 this week, according to a PCWorld article, competing on price might be tough.

Sony’s Digital Reader was covered in a review by The Mirror last Tuesday, in a more comprehensive article looking at several e-book readers. Again, there is not much of a functionality difference. The review notes that the Sony Digital Reader doesn’t synch with Macs well. Ho hum. The cost is $280. Ho Hum. Even a review of the Borders eBook (made by Elonex) noted that the functionality difference between readers was “miniscule”.

What’s the point of all these articles from my perspective? There are a number of vendors making almost identical e-book readers at almost identical prices. Assuming the idea takes off, rather than being subsumed by consumers balking at another device and deciding just to use their cell phone for electronic reading, then the winner will be the device that can provide a comprehensive library of new titles. If format wars get in the way (see this article for a bit on that), then e-book readers will languish like Blu-Ray technology – a great idea without enough content to get off the ground.

As a final thought, I attended a lecture at E3 in Los Angeles a number of years ago. One of the speakers talked about hardware convergence – how many devices will we carry, etc. At that point, a number of us had cell phones, pagers, PDA – all as separate devices. Now, we have the cell phone. It isn’t inconceivable that Eucalyptus, Stanza, Iceberg, Books.app, MS Reader or any of the other cell phoned-based e-book software packages will eventually become the de facto portable book format. The only thing you can bet on is that Trapdoor titles will be there.