Okay, I’m calling this. I don’t know what’s happening with the e-reader market, but I’m 100% sure there are too many participants. Has this ever happened before with emerging tech? Were there fifty different MP3 players before Apple begat the iPod?

Today’s entrant is none other than Creative, known to long-time PC aficionados for their sound technology, and more recently sundry miscellaneous gadgets. Their impending e-reader is called the Mediabook, and unlike the kindle it:

will harness “videos, pictures, text, and services in one device that supports a media-rich experience.”

Which means it won’t be a dedicated e-reader, but some sort of hyrbrid iPhone-ish-netbook-like hand-held computer gizmo. But isn’t this really inevitable? Just as all SUV’s invariably morph into egg-shaped station wagons when gas mileage becomes an issue, all task-specific devices like the Kindle are going to keep drifting back to the hand-held computer model where all-in-one functionality is critical.

The biggest concern I have is that all of these developers are going to blow it. They’re going to go feature crazy and forget that the race to develop a digital book on par with an actual book has not been won — not even close. If that happens, gadget sales go up, e-book sales go flat or down, and everybody forgets (again) that text is still a big deal in the entertainment business. And education business. And newspaper business.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy who runs the local service station is putting together his own e-reader, to be given away with every full tank. And I hear the Girl Scouts are going to be selling one along with their cookies. Can Nintendo be far behind? What about PlaySkool? And where is Boeing on this? If you can build a 7X7, can’t you build an e-reader?

– Mark Barrett

Earlier today the following quote appeared on Twitter (via Guy Charles and others), regarding Jane Friedman’s keynote interview at PBV:

Friedman on enhanced ebooks: “Vook is read and watch… I’m not interested in disrupting the reading experience; it’s sacrosanct.”

By coincidence, I ran across the following quote at almost the same moment while doing research for the previous post:

There are plenty of people who cringe at the cultural toll, who believe that the loss of books means losing the tactile, absorbing relationship with text we’ve enjoyed for centuries. MIT technology guru Nicholas Negroponte would like to remind them that people resisted indoor plumbing, too.

“They complained that if women didn’t do the laundry beside the river and at the fountain they would be alone, but other things started to serve those social purposes,’’ said Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child program, a festival panelist, and Deborah Porter’s significant other. “The reading experience is becoming more social. There are various ways of interacting on e-readers or computers, where people blog and use Twitter, and where the sharp line between the writer and the reader is going away.’’

I understand both of these perspectives, but relative to the functional merits of books they are both wrong, and both wrong for the same reason.   Read more

I was in the local Staples a couple of days ago and happened past a small end-cap display for one of Sony’s new readers. Sensing a blog-post opportunity, I made note of the model number — 505 — and gave it a cursory inspection.   Read more

I intended yesterday to follow up on a tease at the end of this post, but the more I thought about the issue the more I realized it was the tip of a very big iceberg. Apologies for the delay, and apologies in advance for what may seem a bleak assessment.

For several days now I’ve been visiting sites that contain internet fiction of various stripes. I’ve been reading and trying to get my mind around what’s good about internet fiction and what’s not so good. I’ve been trying to come up with a way of comparing apples to apples across different sites and different authors, yet all the while something has been nagging at me so quietly that it took a while to realize what it was.

I don’t like reading fiction on the internet. Assuming that my view represents a non-trivial percentage of the world population, as opposed to the ravings of an ugly American, this would seem to be a problem.   Read more