Now the thing about teens — I think that if we could get them interested in ebooks through their availability, and the fact that they can be read on their gizmos, there’s a potentially lucrative market there. Probably 90% of teens have cell phones. Some of them even have handheld devices like PDAs (which are great for ebooks), and even more of them have stuff like the iPod. If the companies would get on the bandwagon, and do like you said, promoting ebooks in a format compatible with their machine (heck, why not ALL other machines!), they could really capitalize on that.

Great post, and awesome blog.

All the best,
Heather S. Ingemar

This market will be interesting to watch as heavy hitters like Microsoft and Amazon missed the iPod boat. I don’t think we will see this happen on “ebooks.” If the Kindle starts to take off, I think a lot more competitors will emerge and we will not have a single company owning 60% of the market.

However, to make it truly marketable a couple of things will have to change:

DRM – more and more people are refusing to accept DRM. They want to ability to transport data across multiple platforms in a standardized format.

Price – People are simply not willing to pay as much for digital content as they would for the “real thing.”

Publisher acceptance – Publishers, like the RIAA, will extort a high price for digital content and will try and shape the market to best meet their pricing models.

And right on with who we should be watching…14 years olds are really the first “all digital” generation and they will certainly shape the future sooner then our generation did.

Good post!

Of related interest to this posting, you and your readers may want to check out an article in today’s (Nov. 19, 2007) NY Times titled: STUDY LINKS DROP IN TEST SCORES TO A DECLINE IN TIME SPENT READING (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/arts/19nea.html?em&ex=1195621200&en=bc01c3c505ea455e&ei=5087).

“arry Potter, James Patterson and Oprah Winfrey’s book club aside, Americans — particularly young Americans — appear to be reading less for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores are declining. At the same time, performance in other academic disciplines like math and science is dipping for students whose access to books is limited, and employers are rating workers deficient in basic writing skills.”

It’s not a pretty picture. While there is some disagreement amongst various researchers about the study’s conclusions, the consensus seems to be that young Americans, while they may be reading online for various reasons, they are not reading for fun.

From my perspective, it is difficult to read purely for enjoyment on a digital device – it is either too cumbersome, the screen to small or, significantly, hard on the retinas.

For ease on the eyes and utility, portability, and zero energy use (the “green” way to read) there will never be a substitute for the good old fashioned bound book.

Sometimes low-tech is the best tech.

whether or not you’ll have the content
that you want, especially if it’s from a
“major publisher”, is another question.

but have you seen the trash they are
putting out lately for their customers?

-bowerbird

Only a couple weeks earlier, Hachette Book group adopted the open standards – International Digital Publishing Forum’s file format standard for e-books, making it the first trade publisher to adopt the standard.

An open mobile platform and an open standard for e-books… The future of mobile reading looks bright.

Here are some books using the Exact Editions platform that can be read and searched with facility on the iPhone platform:
http://www.exacteditions.com/berkshirepublishing

Its surely very likely that Apple will be producing systems with larger screens which will be even better for viewing films and reading books, but the system already works very well on those small screens.