Mike Piscetelli was a fan of the Kindle e-book reader even before the pipes in his New Jersey home burst and destroyed his library of more than 500 books.
Now he's turning his back on paperbacks in favour of their digital successors.
“From now on, I'm going to carry my library with me wherever I go,” the 44-year-old salesman from Princeton said, vowing to use his insurance money to replace his library with e-books that can be read on the Amazon.com Inc. device.
“No more bookshelves … and God forbid my Kindle gets destroyed, I can still back up all that information off Amazon. Anyone who says anything bad about the Kindle has never used a Kindle.”
Amazon's first Kindle e-book reading device – launched in November, 2007 – was hailed as a watershed moment for the digital book market. But many observers remain unconvinced that book lovers will be willing to ditch paper pages for digital ones the way music fans abandoned CDs for MP3s.
On Monday the world's largest Internet retailer unveiled its upgraded Kindle 2, hoping to expand its ownership base, which is believed to number more than 500,000 users (Amazon has refused to publicly divulge the number of Kindles it has sold).
Still, questions remain as to whether the Kindle is the spark that will finally ignite the e-book industry, or merely an ember that will burn brightly for a moment and fade away.
Sales of digital books are rising, but slowly. E-books represent only about 1 per cent of sales for most publishers, many of which are scrambling to find new distribution models and pricing schemes that will attract readers.
The Kindle – which is not available in Canada – appeals to those consumers who are avid readers and also early adopters of technology, a potential market of only about five million Americans, according to Forrester Research technology analyst James McQuivey. Consumers not ready to invest $359 (U.S.) in a Kindle will likely be content to consume the few e-books they read through a smart phone, he said.
“The question is, once you get past those five million avid readers, are the next 15 million going to be comfortable with the iPhone?” he said. “Chances are they will.”
At the same time, manufacturers of stand-alone reading devices, such as the Kindle and Sony Corp.'s Reader, face increasing competition from services designed for smart phones equipped with large, bright screens, such as Apple Inc.'s iPhone, Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry Storm and Google Inc.'s G1.
Last month, Indigo Books & Music Inc. unveiled plans for a new service known as Shortcovers, which – when it is launched at the end of February – will enable users to buy and download e-books directly to a smart phone over a wireless Internet connection.
“We think we're at a tipping point in the market,” said Michael Serbinis, chief information officer for Indigo and the executive vice-president of the company's Shortcovers initiative.
The company believes users will be interested in the service because it allows them to purchase individual chapters from books – if, for instance, one wanted to download the Venice chapter from a travel book about Italy or sample the first chapter of a bestseller before buying the entire book.
“People are just reading differently,” Mr. Serbinis said “They're reading on screens, they expect to be able to sample … and they expect to be able to do it on the devices they have. We think this will be a billion-dollar industry.”
Google believes readers will be interested in free books, too. Last week, the search engine giant announced it was making more than 1.5 million books already in the public domain available for free to smart-phone users around the world through a mobile version of its Google Book Search website.
Amazon, not willing to discount mobile phones as a medium, announced over the weekend that it was preparing to make Kindle-ready digital books also available on cellphones.
Wholesale revenue from digital book sales in the United States has shot up 183 per cent over the past two years, from $4.9-million (U.S.) in the third quarter of 2006 to $13.9-million in the third quarter of 2008, according to data from the International Digital Publishing Forum. Analysts, however, suggest the retail market for e-books could be worth as much as $100-million.
“It's a very small industry but it's growing by huge percentages,” said Malle Vallik, Harlequin Enterprises Ltd.'s director for digital content and interactivity.
The Toronto-based publisher of romance novels digitizes all 120 of the works it produces every month. The company also publishes digital-only short stories that retail for $2.99, including steamy historical tales and a line of erotic stories known as Spice Briefs.
Although devices such as the Kindle have kicked new life into e-book sales, Ms. Vallik said Harlequin hasn't decided to back one particular device or platform. It even struck a deal in January to distribute 16 books free though Lexcycle Inc.'s popular Stanza e-book reader application for the iPhone.
“We're incredibly platform-agnostic,” she said. “Our basic theory is that wherever women are, we are. Whatever exists out there as a reading forum, we want to be there, and we're going to let the reader decide the winner.”
