26 September 2007
Electronic Book Reading Devices Growing in Popularity
Educators and librarians think devices spur literacy, promote reading
Washington -- William Birnes has specific reading tastes: he prefers books about UFOs and paranormal phenomena. Yet his preferences for how he reads and how he collects his books have made him part of a growing number of Americans who have discovered electronic book reading devices.
Birnes likes to read print that is enlarged, prefers pages that are backlit and loathes lifting heavy suitcases when he travels.
The newest forms of electronic book readers -- known simply as readers -- are bought by people who travel frequently, according to Washington bookseller Richard Laurberg of the retail chain Borders. “The gadgets are high-end, but for people who want to travel with five or six books with them at a time, they are convenient,” Laurberg said.
These “gadgets” have been around for about 10 years, but, until recently, they have not captured the attention of consumers. The latest devices use digital memory cards that can store hundreds of books.
Digital books have been available for at least as long as digital music, but consumers complained that they could not find mobile reading devices as convenient and functional as popular music players.
This is beginning to change, booksellers say. The most popular reader at Borders, according to Laurberg, is the Sony Reader, launched in summer 2007. It has enough internal memory to hold 80 books and a battery that lasts for 7,500 page turns or up to three weeks, depending on usage, according to Sony Vice President Ron Hawkins.
“Digital readers can hold a stack of books,” Hawkins told USINFO. Travelers and commuters taking multiple books and reading materials with them are the consumers most interested in the readers, Hawkins said.
Birnes is the founder of the Filament Book Club in Los Angeles, which provides electronic reading devices free to members. Birnes told USINFO that his club appeals to people who “migrate” -- people who go south for winter and north for summer. The readers allow users to magnify the print size and to make notes. They are resilient, yet slim as a paperback book and lightweight, Birnes said.
The Sony Reader has a reflective screen that uses ambient light, which means holding the device is much like holding a book, and it can display Spanish, French, Italian and German text in addition to English. Sony’s version of the Reader displaying Japanese text was launched in Japan in 2004.
This fall, online retailer Amazon.com launched Kindle, an electronic book reader that connects wirelessly to Amazon’s e-bookstore. One unique advantage of the wireless reader is that consumers would not need access to a computer to download digitized books.
Bringing electronic readers into the mainstream also means that small publishers can sell books to niche consumers, and even large publishers can breathe new life into backlists and out-of-print books by digitizing them.
Birnes said he hopes to partner with school districts to provide readers at no cost to students. “The readers would stay with the students and get passed on from year to year,” he said. The American Chiropractic Association reports that students often carry the equivalent of a quarter of their body weight in backpacks, which can lead to back pain and poor posture.
In September, children at the Bi-Cultural Day School in Stamford, Connecticut, began participating in a pilot program by Sony to bring its Reader to classrooms.
The devices, provided by Sony, are uploaded with books from Sony’s ebooks.connect.com. Included are classics such as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Now, instead of lugging around a pile of books, students carry only the slim Reader. Students can scroll through the menu on the Reader’s six-inch screen and turn the pages of the books with the push of a button.
For books whose digital rights are protected, consumers must download material for the Reader directly from Sony’s e-bookstore. Three million free e-books downloadable from Project Gutenberg also are compatible with most reading devices. (See related article.)
Educators and librarians say portable electronic devices are just another way to encourage literacy and reading, which, according to U.S. Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, “changes lives.” The 2007 National Book Festival, organized by the Library of Congress and hosted by first lady Laura Bush, will be held September 29 on the National Mall in Washington.
Additional information on the Filament Book Club and the Sony Reader is available on the companies’ Web sites. Information on the National Book Festival is available on the Library of Congress Web site.
(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
