[Marketing] Forrester: e-reader sales exploding (1m units for holiday season, 6m units projected for 2010)

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

Hi,

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 1:25 PM, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,53825,00.html
>
> This report is being widely reported in the tech and mainstream press, e.g.:
>
> http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jSEAAZS_Y9QD8xiVACWhSDFzHXQQ
> http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idCNN0853892120091008?rpc=44
>
> There's an improved Kindle offer, Barnes & Noble (a major US
> bookseller) will offer an Android-powered reader, and rumors are thick
> about an Apple unit in early 2010.
>
> I'm tempted to put a spotlight on Sugar's e-reader capabilities for
> the Blueberry launch planned for late November. To do so, I need to
> understand better the format issues, which I'm a little confused
> about. Is ePub best, or something else?
>

The major advantage of Epub over others is that it is "reflowable".
Traditionally, PDF and other formats have had the problem that when
you zoom in to increase the font size/better adapt to your reader, you
would often have to scroll horizontally as well.

Epub is being adapted at a rapid pace by major players - Google
(http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/08/download-over-million-public-domain.html),
Internet Archive (not officially announced yet), Sony
(http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3834431/), Project
Gutenberg (http://www.pg-news.org/20090320/epub-books-now-available-at-project-gutenberg/),
O'Reilly (http://oreilly.com/ebooks/epub/), etc. Moreover, there are
sites dedicated to producing very high quality Epub files, like
feedbooks.com and http://www.epubbooks.com/

Right now, I'm quite happy with the level of support Read offers for
Epubs from various sources, though it can be improved a lot. More help
is needed in testing how Read renders Epubs from various sources and
in various devices (I have primarily limited my testing to XO-1(.5)
and sugar-jhbuild).  As far as annotations go, we only support
bookmarks and notes associated with the bookmarks (this is applicable
to _all_ fileformats), but I'm currently working on epub specific
annotation features such as highlighting portions of the text and
associating notes with highlighted portions, etc.
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/09/28/23918/ offers some
interesting viewpoints on what is needed from a electronic book
reader.

Epub, of course is only one part of the equation. Another yet equally
important part of the puzzle is book acquisition (both from the
Internet and from the local school server). James Simmons's Get
Internet Archive Books activity handles that part. Now that the 0.86
release rush is over, I'm extending that activity to support the
upcoming OPDS standard, which will probably become the standard way
for ebook distributors to publish their catalog online. This means
that apart from the Internet Archive, the activity will be able to
query and download other vendors like feedbooks, etc as well. At some
point, my plan is to implement a OPDS server system/local cache system
for the school server so that we can address bandwidth starved use
cases.

Let me know if you need any more information.

(I really need to do a proper blog post about all this.. :-(

Thanks,
Sayamindu





-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]