While the purist may frown upon the idea of reading digital books, digital reading does have many advantages and e-book readers are now slowly gaining popularity.
Flipping through the pages, the smell of ink, the feel of the paper, the fonts, the style, layout, the colors, and the cover all add to the reading experience. However, these days instead of pouring over big tomes, you will find people peering over their e-book readers or smartphones. In the digital age, laying your hands on the latest bestseller will take a whole new meaning. It would mean simply downloading the book from Amazon or another digital distribution service, rather than going to the bookstore to get your copy. Digitized books have revolutionalised the way we read. However, this is not a recent phenomenon. The journey of digitized books or e-books began in 1971 with the launch of Project Gutenberg, which was an eff ort to digitize and archive cultural works. It’s the oldest digital library and has well over 34,000 titles available for free. The fi rst e-book reader was launched in 1998. The intelligent reading system, SoftBook, was developed by SoftBook Press Inc in the US. Even though the e-book readers have been around for a long time, they gained popularity only recently with the launch of Amazon’s Kindle. Prior to that, e-book readers were limited to a niche and did not gain much popularity mainly due to lack of content. Another factor that has fueled the popularity is the growing number of smartphones. These phones come equipped with PDF readers, which is also a popular format for e-books. This has resulted in an increase in the number books, newspapers, and magazines being adapted for e-book readers and smartphones. E-readers take reading to a whole new level by allowing you to customize font size, brightness, contrast, etc. for ease of reading. You can even look up meanings of words, search for text throughout the book, highlight text, add notes, and much more. Some e-readers also have a text to speech feature, which can be an added advantage. Additionally, most e-readers are Wi-Fi enabled so you can even browse the Internet, watch videos, and play music on them.
E-Ink or LCD Screen?
There are two categories of e-readers available in the market; one uses e-ink technology, while the other uses an LCD display. An e-reader that makes use of e-ink or electronic ink technology, which gives the impression of a real paper thanks to its 16-level grayscale. Also referred to as electronic paper display, it consumes far lesser power compared to an LCD display. Another advantage is the fact that it doesn't have a backlight and so it doesn't emit a glare. As a result, you can comfortably read outdoors even in bright sunlight. However, the fact that it does not have a backlight makes it a bit diffi cult to read in low light, but this can be resolved by using a clip-on light. The biggest disadvantage of e-ink is that it is only available in grayscale. This works fi ne for novels, but when it comes to newspapers, magazines or even books for children, it could spoil the fun. The makers of e-ink have launched its e-ink color screen Triton, but it remains to be seen how soon it will be adapted. On the other hand, devices like the Apple iPad or the Nook Color from Barnes & Noble use the LCD technology to provide a color display, but the LCD screen gives out a lot of glare. They use refl ective screens, almost turning the surface into a mirror and making it impossible to read outdoors. Available Content Internationally, almost all major newspapers and magazines are already available for e-readers on a subscription basis. Recently Richard Branson of the Virgin Group launched a fi rst-of-its-kind iPad-only magazine, Project. If reports are to be believed, media magnate Rupert Murdoch is also set to launch an iPad newspaper called The Daily. Further fueling this fi re is the announcement from search giant Google that it will
introduce Google Editions by year-end, which will allow users to buy e-books, store them online and then read them from any computing device with an Internet connection. Finding content for your e-reader shouldn’t be a problem. For Kindle, you can source content from Amazon’s extensive collection. You can easily order
e-books from around the world through Amazon’s Wishpernet. You can even read the e-books purchased from Amazon on your iPad with the help of the Kindle app. These e-readers support the PDF format so you can even directly upload PDF’s that you have downloaded online from various sources. From the Indian perspective, there is still a long way to go when it comes to local content in digital form. As of now, publications like Tehelka, Seminar, India Today, Business Today and newspapers like Indian Express, Hindustan Times, Mint, and The Financial Express are available for e-readers. Apart from that, Indian manufacturers who have launched e-readers have strategic tieups with major publishers and off er good discounts on newly published novels. Another major plus point is that they even support local Indian languages. Wink, one such Indian e-reader from EC Media, currently supports as many as fi ve local languages. “We plan to have 15 languages. As of now, Wink supports Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi, Kannada and Marathi. Our content spans various subjects and genres and from all leading publishers, Indian as well as international. The content is being constantly updated by signing up with publishers, and we propose to add
about 5,000 books a quarter starting January 2011,” says Sirisha Voruganti, Vice President of Operations, EC Media International. On the other hand, the Pi e-reader from Infi beam came up with interesting features like self-publishing tools. Vishal Mehta, Founder and CEO of Infi beam. com says, “Infi beam.com has a selection of more than 5 lakh e-books from major publishers and authors, which can be read directly on our e-book reader Infi beam Pi. In addition, there is a selection of more than 1 crore e-books that can be read directly on Infi beam Pi for free since their copyrights have expired. Finally, we have our own digital publishing platform Indigi, where authors and publishers can provide digital versions of their books to be rights managed directly on any device, including Infi beam Pi, PCs and mobile phones. We have more than 2,000 authors and publishers in India who have submitted digital copies of their books, where physical versions are not available in any stores. These are exclusively available on Infi beam.com.”
Future of e-readers
The trend of e-readers has been slow to catch on. People are slowly getting used to reading books and even newspapers online or on a smartphone, so buying a dedicated device for it isn’t too farfetched.Bibliophiles may detest the idea e-readers as, for one, they don’t provide you with a sense of ownership. It’s not like owning an actual book, which you cherish and can go back to reading when you feel like. Still, e-readers are slowly gaining popularity, especially amongst the newer generation that is adept at handling gadgets. With parents agonizing over the fact that the younger generation shies away from reading books, an
e-reader can be the perfect solution. “The future looks good”, says Sirisha Voruganti, adding, “We believe e-reading will pickup. I see corporations, including IT companies, schools and colleges, as well as the hospitality and airline industries keen on this for e-reading and e-learning. Also, the publishing industry incurs huge costs in preserving older books. E-reading overcomes all this. In addition, it also has a very strong ‘go green’ message.” According to Infi beam’s Vishal Mehta, it’s a win-win situation for all. “For customers, e-books are very convenient as one can download and start reading the book, newspaper or magazine instantaneously. With the e-ink screen, which is available on Infi beam Pi, one can get a reading experience similar to paper. For publishers, it is a superb solution as books never go out of stock. E-books provide superior value for customers, authors, publishers and retailers, so it is here to stay.”
