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Now Cellphones take on e-readers
By siliconindia
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Friday, 02 January 2009, 16:22 IST |
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Bangalore: The e-book reading revolution triggered off by Amazon and Sony through much celebrated gadgets like Kindle and Reader Digital Book seem to be short-lived as their service is now offered by iPhones. Getting the book fix via mobile phone is a method now readers consider more convenient than using an exclusive e-book reader like the above said gadgets, reports Businessweek.
Take the case of Adam Parks, an avid reader of digital books. Instead of downloading the titles he reads each year onto an electronic book device like Kindle, Parks flips through pages -Website design manuals and Sun Tzu's The Art of War are recent favorites- on his iPhone.
The new twist in the e-book reading revolution is going to help travelers more. "I travel a lot in Asia and in the U.S.," says Parks, a marketing executive, adding, "If you are running from airport to airport and from city to city, bringing an extra piece of equipment loses some of its value."
Though owning a Kindle may hold value for the consumers who are snapping up the devices so fast that it has been sold out since November, the idea of downloading a book onto a device you already own appears more appealing for cash-strapped and space-constrained consumers. And as smartphones have become more ubiquitous, so have the tools that make it easy for users to download a book for a fraction of the cost of buying one elsewhere.
According to Readdle, the Ukraine-based startup that created the free application that makes the download possible, users of the iPhone and its cousin, the iPod touch, have downloaded William Shakespeare's collected works more than 300,000 times from the Apple iTunes App Store. The books section in the Apple iTunes App Store lists about 700 titles; Apple separately offers 72 audio books.
While new titles like Twilight may cost as much as a paperback at a book store, many royalty-free classics are available for cheap prices. The most purchased book on iTunes is a 99-cents collection of 14 children's books, including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Gulliver's Travels, and Robinson Crusoe. At Amazon's Kindle store, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland alone sells for 99 cent to $2.
Some book publishers embrace the mobile-book trend and see it as a way to attract new readers. "There's a chance for us as publishers to reach a wider audience, maybe people who weren't walking into the bookstore or going to Amazon," says Matt Shatz, vice-president for digital at Random House. In December, Random House made some of its best sellers available through the iPhone iphoneand iPod touch. A month earlier, publishers Pan Macmillan and Simon & Schuster made their books available for the iPhone through a free application called Stanza, made by Lexcycle.