While some publishers are caught up in Kindle excitement, many are neglecting what might be a far, far more important platform for e-book in the long run—cellphones.
"Think about that tiny SD-Micro chip in your cell phone," an upbeat story on Project Gutenberg in the Edmonton Sun quotes PG founder Michael Hart. "They go up to eight gigabytes now. Each gigabyte can hold a thousand books containing one million characters each."
Exactly. You can buy an 8G chip for maybe $30-$40 now, and the price could be less than $5-$10 within five years and maybe sooner, if we extrapolate from earlier cost declines. Even more significantly, E Ink prices will decline, and that technology will improve. People want to carry around only so many gizmos at once, so I see a big future for phones as E book readers, whether the displays are E Ink or OLED or others. Screenshot shows Books.app, an e-reader for the iPhone (caveat).
ePub and the multi-device issue
Some people may use phones for e-reading when out and about, then turn to Kindle-style devices at home. In fact, they may want to run e-books on many devices, a powerful argument against DRM and for a nonproprietary standard like ePub. Meanwhile stay tuned for the Mobipocket version for the iPhone—hardly an ePub-level solution to the interoperability problem but a little progress in the iPh area.
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The fact that this is already becoming true in Japan (according to a Sony report recently that is, that people there so prefer reading on cell phones that Sony is discontinuing its reader sales in Japan), hints at what could be the future here. But dispite those that say their phone, even the iPhone, would make a satisfactory reader, I don’t think the screen size is really big enough, and many who are reading on their phones now (in the US) apparently concede that much. Battery life too would be further limited. When the technology improves, having a bigger screen expand out of the side of your phone (like the Radius)will certainly advance the concept to something more mainstream, but we have a ways to go before we get there. Until then, a smart phone and a wifi/bluetooth/touch equiped ereader could leverage the technology we have today for a pretty good interim solution.
Hi, TRB. Thanks, and, yes, I agree screen size counts, but it’s an individual choice. Sometimes, even with a 7 inch screen handy on my OLPC laptop, I want to read something on a PDA. I’m just in the mood for that. Depends on people’s eyes. You’ve already noted the popularity of cellphone reading in Japan.
Certain readers actually may prefer narrow, newspaper-sized columns, while others want the relatively “wide-open spaces” of a Kindle or Sony. It’s somewhat of an age issue. Older people, despite possible problems with the relatively low contrast of E Ink, may want those machines.
At any rate, ultimately, in an improved form, the Radius-type approach could be common. Amazon in in the phone/e-book hardware biz, not just the e-book biz? Of course. Thanks. David