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

[Jim Simmons]

I would agree with Sayamindu's points and add a couple more.

1).  The DjVu format supported by Read can give a book pages that look
like the original book's pages with a reasonable file size.  This
includes pictures in color, something ebook readers generally don't
offer.  This is a natural format for children's books, many of which
are available from the Internet Archive.

2).  Read Etexts can do text to speech with word highlighting for any
plain text book.  Project Gutenberg offers 28,0000 of these for free,
in several languages.  You can change the "voice" the computer uses to
suit the language of the book.

3).  View Slides can be used to read comic books in the popular .cbz format.

4).  Sugar Activities support the important formats that free books
come in: PDF, DjVu, EPub, plain text, RTF, and .cbz.  You can read
books from Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, the Baen Free
Library, and other sources of free books.

5).  All reading Activities offer some way to annotate texts,
highlight passages, and add multiple bookmarks.  All reading
Activities can share books over a network.

James Simmons


> Date: Fri, 9 Oct 2009 09:55:47 +0200
> From: Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Marketing] Forrester: e-reader sales exploding (1m units for
>        holiday season, 6m      units projected for 2010)
> To: iaep <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>,    Sugar Labs Marketing
>        <marketing at lists.sugarlabs.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <378b2b050910090055o3156c605g7f13c8e0eb996767 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> 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?
>
> thanks
>
> Sean