The Reading Edge Podcast

On February 17, 2010, I visited in person with Andrew Savikas, vice president for digital initiatives at O’Reilly Media.  Andrew is based at O’Reilly’s office in Cambridge, Mass., where Tim O’Reilly started the business in 1978.

We spoke of many things, including the ePub format (Andrew recently ran for and was elected to the Board of the International Digital Publishing Forum), how O’Reilly’s eBook publishing business is thriving without using Digital Rights Management, and why the Kindle and other e Ink-based readers do not represent disruptive technology in relation to the book since Gutenberg.  What does?  The answer is probably closer than you think – at this very moment.  Andrew mentioned The Strategy Paradox as a way to gain insight into Amazon’s eBooks strategy.  To learn more about Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive and sustaining technologies, you might want to check out his The Strategy Paradox. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.

Andrew also runs O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference Feb. 22-24 in New York City, which just reached sold-out status.  More than 1,000 attendees will have a chance to explore the changing world of publishing, and much of the content will be available online soon. If you can’t wait, you can check out some of the presentations made at the 2009 TOC conference.

NOTE: Andrew just emailed me to say the keynotes for the 2010 Tools of Change conference will be live-streamed.  Check here for details.

Click here for Tim O’Reilly’s seminal 2002 essay titled “Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution,” which Andrew mentions in the interview.

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My review of the BookGem eBook holder, which I purchased for $14.95 from BookGem.com . In the video I demonstrate how it works with a Kindle, a nook, a Sony Reader Daily Edition, and a Kindle DX. The only one I tried that did not work well with this useful holder was my original Kindle, because the spring-loaded clamps landed on the keyboard.

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James McQuivey of Forrester Research

On the Monday after the weekend when Amazon and Macmillan faced off in a dramatic battle over eBook pricing, I turned to James McQuivey, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, for his perspective on who won, what the stakes are, and what might lie ahead.

James says his contacts at other publishers are disappointed that this turned into a mud fight, but he suggests there will be benefits from having the issue finally out in the open.  He also shares his thoughts on how Apple’s new iPad figures in to all this.

I’ll have the second half of this interview on The Kindle Chronicles episode 81, which will be uploaded as usual on Friday, February 5.  In that portion, James will discuss what he and his teammates at Forrester are calling “The Kindle Flame,” by which they mean the next generation of Kindle that might, if it gets certain things right, set the eBook market fully ablaze as opposed to merely kindled.

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This is the conclusion of my January 27, 2010, interview with New York Times technology reporter Brad Stone.  For the first part of the interview, please check out Episode 80 of my other podcast, The Kindle Chronicles.  We spoke the evening after Brad had attended Apple’s unveiling of the iPad.

In this segment, Brad looks ahead at Amazon’s next moves and comments.  He’s found 46 new jobs posted at Amazon’s Lab126, the group that makes and advances the Kindle. Brad says at one point, “The Kindle tablet may be right around the corner.”

Following the interview, I’ve included a fair-use excerpt of audio from Steve Jobs’s comments about the Kindle and the new iBooks app which will come on the iPad, setting up a high-stakes strategic battle between Apple and Amazon.  Does Steve sound as if he’s got his heart in this fight?  Listen, and decide.

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Regina Sergiyenko of Pocketbook USA

This episode contains three more interviews from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this month.

First up is Laura Wu, a product manager for Netronix, Inc., the Taiwan-based maker of eReaders for Interead, Bookeen, and Pocketbook USA, among others.  Laura confirmed reports that Netronix plans to sell a million eReaders in 2010.

Phil Wood, marketing director at Interead, said the U.K.-based company relies on Netronix for some of its products, but not all of them.

Regina Sergiyenko, regional director in the US for the Ukraine-based Pocketbook, emphasized the fact that her company’s product is available in many languages.

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This is an interview Darlene and I did on Friday, January 8, 2010, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas with Laurent Picard, co-founder of the Paris-based Bookeen, creator of the Cybook series of eReaders, including the recently released Opus.

Laurent also showed us a prototype of the Horizon, due out in April, which will have a screen not based on eInk technology but instead provided by SiPix. Note: Be forewarned that the SiPix link will open with an irritating New Agey audio file that you will have to turn off by clicking on a note icon at the lower left if you want to explore their site in peace.

Bookeen’s original eBook, the Cybook Generation One, made its debut in 2007 just after the first eInk-screened Sony Reader but a couple of weeks ahead of the original Kindle. Laurent revealed a tidbit I’d never heard before, namely that the Kindle was code-named Fiona.  Thank goodness they brought in some branding wizards to dream up an alternative to that–otherwise we’d now all be talking about the Fiona-sphere.

I hope you’ll enjoy this conversation with Laurent Picard as much as we did.  And my apologies to him and to other French speakers for my brief forays into their beautiful language.

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This is the unboxing video for my Sony Reader Daily Edition, which arrived today, with side-by-side comparisons with my Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble nook.  (Don’t worry about the black screen; if you click on it the video will play.)

My wife Darlene and agreed that, on first impression, the Daily Edition’s screen readability is markedly inferior to that of the Kindle and nook.  Of the latter two, we found that the nook’s contrast seems slightly better, because the background to the text is lighter.  See for yourself in the video.

The Daily Edition is gorgeous, but it feels like a different animal in the eBook jungle.  It feels like a machine, a handsomely designed machine, but one better suited for a corporate road warrior than a bookish reader.  For example, I doubt there will be a big market for pretty skins and fancy covers for the Daily Edition, whose official name is PRS-900BC.  It’s just not that sort of device.  Plus, it already comes with a cover that’s attached to it, and I haven’t figured out yet if you can remove it to make way for something that, say, Oberon or M-Edge Accessories might create for it.

That said, I’m looking forward to playing with the Daily Edition. The touch screen seems much more responsive to that of the nook’s lower panel. It failed to find the Sony Reader Store tonight while we were in the dining room.  Just to check the competition, I fired up the Kindle and it found the mothership in seconds.

The Daily Edition isn’t cheap. At $399 it bears a hefty $140 premium over the Kindle and the nook.

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From the OverDrive web site

This is an interview on Friday, January 8, 2010, at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) with David Burleigh, director of marketing for OverDrive, which is the leading provider of public library connections to eBook readers such as the Barnes & Noble nook and the Sony Reader.

After the interview, I’ve added my own observations based on using OverDrive to access books for my nook at the Denver Public Library.

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Otis Gates is a Sony Reader product expert for Sony Electronics.  Darlene and I interviewed him on January 9, 2010, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.  Is His job is to translate the eReader’s specifications and capabilities into usable form for, say, a Best Buy sales rep demonstrating a Daily Edition to a customer.

Otis’s familiarity with the Daily Edition made him a great person to talk to about this promising new entry into the eBook sector.  Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal has just posted an even-handed review of the Daily Edition, calling it “a big boost for Sony” that “enables them to be in the game in a bigger way than they have been,” mainly because it is Sony’s first wireless eReader.

My own Daily Edition will arrive here in Denver next week, and I’m looking forward to putting it through its paces.  I’m not thrilled that it comes with a stylus that I will probably lose, but the touch screen looks intriguing and I’ll be interested to see how much of an advantage the Daily Edition’s seven-inch diagonal measurement gives it over the six-inch diagonal of the Kindle.

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