War and Peace: coming soon to your E-book reader?

By Peter Zschunke Sep 19, 2010, 12:18 GMT

Frankfurt - Prophesying the end of the printed book has been standard practice in recent years.

This year, US computer science professor Nicholas Negroponte led the charge, stating at Techonomy, a high-tech conference, that he expects the printed book to be history within five years.

That might be one of the more dire predictions. But printed books are increasingly under pressure, especially with the recent release of Apple's iPad, which comes with an e-book function. The inclusion of that feature drew attention to itself, but also to other e-book readers.

Turnover at Amazon, the online bookseller, hints at what is to come. In its second quarter of US sales, Amazon sold 43 per cent more e-books for its Kindle reader than printed hardcover books. Amazon President Jeff Bezos expects e-book sales to overtake paperback sales by the summer of 2011.

And the Kindle hasn't even been out that long. It is only one of many e-book readers that were featured at the recent IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin. Now the Frankfurt book fair, which runs October 6-10, is getting ready to face digital books.

'Until now, e-books have been a niche product here in Germany, an extension of the printed book,' says Christina Knecht of the Carl Hanser Press. 'Like the audio book,' she adds.

Only a few e-books have been able to achieve four-figure sales figures in the German market, but that might be because, until now, most marketing for the iPad has focused on it as a laptop replacement, not an e-reader.

'The nicest thing that I can say is what Umberto Eco has already said: He can't imagine reading War and Peace as an e-book,' Knecht says.

So far, readers with electronic-ink screens have dominated the market. These flat-screen devices use little power and show the text in a reader-friendly format, albeit in black-and-white.

However, turning the page usually leads to a short flicker on the screen, since the image has to be re-sorted to accommodate the new page of script. And if an e-ink machine comes with a touchscreen, that can disrupt the high-contrast display.

But now the iPad shows pages in colour and in sharp contrast. Of course, reading the LCD screen with its LED lights can be exhausting over the long term. And it eats up more energy than an e-ink display.

'The iPad changed the entire market for e-book readers,' says Fabian Heinrich of txtr, a Berlin-based e-book company. 'From our perspective, it is not the ideal reading device, but it did spread awareness about e-reading.'

Txtr has long since had plans to release its own txtr-Reader, with an e-ink display and a wireless connection, by the end of the year. But it has recently changed its business model, putting more weight on its online platform, where a variety of devices can be used to access e-books.

But most publishing houses remain leery about getting into the e-book business. They are concerned that the publishing industry could end up with the same problems as the music industry, which has to deal with MP3s - files that can be easily copied and are predominantly sold via Apple's iTunes store, giving Apple the power to set prices.

Unlike songs, digital books are sold with protection against copying, standards like the EPUB format in connection with Digital Rights Management technology from Adobe, which give it a user ID. That means the book can only be loaded onto a maximum of six devices.

'The EPUB format is definitely the standard,' says txtr spokesman Heinrich. It's used by everything from iPad's iBooks application to Sony readers with e-ink displays. It's also used for free books without copy protection, like those from the Gutenberg Project.

That project offers books for which copyright protection has expired, including the English-language version of Tolstoy's War and Peace.

Only Kindle has gone its own way, using its AZW format, meaning those e-books can only be read on a Kindle or using the right software from Amazon.

Customers could only benefit if the e-book market developed like that for online music. Even some in the industry share that perspective.

'Copy protection only has disadvantages. Transferring it to additional devices, swapping, it's just difficult and annoying,' says book salesman and blogger Bernd Sommerfeld.