Looks like Amazon’s seemingly definitive Kindle e-reader is getting some company. Rumor has it that

On Monday, Netherlands-based iRex Technologies is slated to unveil the iRex Reader 1000, the first in a wave of e-reader devices that promise bigger screens and improved interfaces and functionality. And unlike Kindle or Sony’s Reader, this second generation of e-readers aims to bring innovative E-ink display technology to the more demanding, and possibly more lucrative, world of business.

The iRex Reader 1000 offers a 10.2-inch diagonal E-Inkscreen, far larger than Kindle’s 6-inch screen or even iRex’s own 8.1-inch diagonal iLiad, its last e-book model. That stretched display is designed to work with any file format, be it an e-book, a full-sized PDF, a Word document or HTML. Like earlier iRex devices, it sports a stylus and touch screen for taking notes and marking documents.

The iRex will run from $650 to $850. Ouch. That’s almost the price of a laptop. I think I’ll stick with my old-fashioned paper books for now.

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Remember that book Carrie reads from to Big in bed in Sex and the City: The Movie? It’s called Love Letters of Great Men, and it doesn’t exist… at least until now. British publisher Macmillan just published a collection of those real love letters.

It doesn’t take a lot of digging around, though, to see that several similar books of a quickie nature have been tossed out to SATC fans over the last few months (including one that’s a new reprint of a 1924 book!). None of those books, however, is from a powerhouse like Macmillan, or has gotten quite to promotional push as this one will.

I do hope all those SATC fans who’ve been clamoring for this book won’t be disappointed, because — as John Mullan points out at the Guardian book blog — no one really wants to read other people’s love letters, and we probably wouldn’t want to receive one like these, either (“the intensity of the letters is usually caused by the impossibility of the passion they describe…”).

(Technorati tags: Sex and the City, Love Letters of Great Men)

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Are people actually using Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader? It seems like they are — TechCrunch is reporting that 240,000 of the things have been sold so far.

Since I first wrote about the Kindle last year, I’ve seen one in the flesh, so to speak — it’s way cooler than I ever imagined — and have heard from friends who’ve gotten hooked on them, and the general consensus seems to be that the only people complaining about them are those who haven’t actually used one. I wouldn’t mind the chance to play around with a Kindle on an extended basis…

(Technorati tags: Kindle)

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It’s all the rage, apparently: authors are making movie-style trailers for their self-published books:

(If you’re intrigued, buy Tied to the Tracks at Amazon.)

(Technorati tags: Tied to the Tracks, book trailers)

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When I first heard about Amazon’s new e-reader, Kindle, last week, I was pretty excited. Yes, it’s pricey, at $400, but the idea of being able to read not just books but newspapers and blogs wirelessly and comfortably really appeals to me, as does the idea of being able to carry around a lot of reading material in a small package. (As a subway rider who hauls around a lot of stuff with me every day, this can be a matter of some concern. If I’ve got only a few chapters left in a book, do I take it with me on my trip plus something else to read when I finish that — which means carrying around an extra book all day — or do I put the almost-done book aside to finish later and just start on a new book? Truly, this is a dilemma of literary proportions.)

But now the reviews are coming in, and it seems as if the ideal e-book is not yet here. Tech columnist Walter Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal has panned it. David Rothman of Publishers Weekly worries about the Kindle’s “Big Brotherish terms of use” and the privacy issues involved: Amazon keeps track not only of what you read on your Kindle but where you place bookmark and what electronic notes you make on your reading. Yikes.

Publishing industry consultant and observer Laura Dawson has a nicely concise take on the Kindle:

By now, the Kindle device from Amazon has been out for a full week and the reviews are in. In the “plus” column: The E-Ink technology is great. The battery technology is amazing. The fact that it doesn’t have to be connected to a computer to download content is really cool. The wireless subscription getting picked up by Amazon (so you can have delivery of newspapers, blogs, magazines to your Kindle) is also great. Some say it’s not quite as ugly as the prototype. In the “minus” column: While the wireless subscription is free, the content (which is normally free on the web) is not. The selection of Kindle-ready books offered for sale on Amazon could be much better. The device does not read PDFs. You cannot text portions of what you’re reading to anyone. And it looks like something from Toys ’R’ Us.

(That’s from her email newsletter “The Big Picture,” which you can read online with a free subscription.)

I don’t think it looks like a toy — I think it looks like something out of Star Trek (a good thing, as far as I’m concerned). And while it’s true, as Dawson says, that you can read blogs and newspapers online for free, books still demand to be paid for. Still, she eventually concludes that the Kindle is “yet another artifact of interesting-but-not-very-useful technology.”

Which seems to be the general consensus in both the book and geek-toy worlds. Oh well: I guess I’m sticking with paper books for now.

(Technorati tags: Amazon Kindle)

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Looks like the major player in bookselling these days has decided that print-on-demand is the coming thing:

Multiple HP Indigo digital presses have been installed at Amazon fulfillment centers and are now producing full-color books on demand as well as color covers for black and white books.

Why?

The books-on-demand market is expected to grow from approximately 20 billion book pages in 2006 to approximately 38 billion book pages by 2009. This is due chiefly to the increasing demand for small-volume, rare and self-published books.

This is great news for book lovers around the world. No innovation in print publishing today can take off without the backing of the 800-pound gorilla in the virtual room, and this is Amazon saying that POD is not only here to stay but is set to take off. This will make it even easier for boutique publishers like Cosimo to continue our mission to bring back into print — in attractive new editions — lost classics that have been unavailable to readers for decades, and longer, and to bring to light the work of new authors with more select readerships than those the corporate publishing houses deign to deal with.

It’s an exciting time to be a reader and a writer…

(Technorati tags: Amazon, POD, print on demand)

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Google, which has been revolutionizing how surfers use the Web for years, is rocking the Net again with its new Google Book Search, which allows surfers to do full-text searches on copyrighted volumes, under certain restrictions by publishers, and on public domain material in an unrestricted manner; readers can also download and print out PDFs of works in the public domain.

Publishers are worried about losing control of their works, according to Book Business, and

have raised issue with the search’s display of portions of copyright-protected works without prior approval…

The Mountain View,Calif-based company contends the search constitutes fair use and offers publishers the opportunity to request how and if their content will be used.

According to Google, the company does “not enable downloading of any books under copyright. Unless we have the publisher’s permission to show more, we display only basic bibliographic information, and, in many cases, small snippets of text - at most, a few lines of text surrounding a search term.”

An article in yesterday’s International Herald Tribune outlines some of the worries of the major publishers, who’ve seen how Napster and the iPod have rattled the music industry and are hoping to head off similar chaos in the book biz while they still can:

There is no hit device for reading books electronically, nor is there a place to go online to browse or download an unbeatable selection of books. There is, however, a keen awareness among publishing executives that this day will come - and that they need to shape, rather than be shaped by, developments.

There is a new device, however, with the potential to become that hit: Sony has just launched the Sony Reader, a beautiful — if limited — toy that could evolve into the iPod for books. The price will have to be lower — the Reader retails for $350 — as will the cost of the downloadable books, which are barely cheaper than their hard-copy versions. More on my wishlist for the Reader: a nonproprietary format — it can already read PDF files, which is good, but I’m not gonna spend $350 for something that can’t read all e-books.

We’re on the edge of an exciting time for publishing — scary, perhaps, for the big corporations, which are about to lose their near-exclusive channel for distributing books, and crazy, definitely, for readers, as competing efforts to digitize the world’s library butt heads. We’ll see mishmashes of incompatible formats and duplicated effort before it all settles down into something genuinely useful. Google is already embroiled in lawsuits and legal spats with publishers and rival e-corps, according to the Los Angeles Times:

Google Inc. will subpoena information from Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. to help fight copyright lawsuits over its book-scanning project.

Google, the world’s most-used search engine, is seeking information on rival projects by the companies, including book lists, costs, estimated sales, dealings with publishers and possible benefit or harm to copyright owners, according to papers filed in U.S. District Court in New York.

In the end, it can only be readers who will benefit, as we get access to more and more diverse material than we ever have before (I discussed how absolutely thrilling this is for readers in a post this past spring at my blog Geek Philosophy). Google Book Search’s official blog, Inside Google Book Search, offers a hint about how wide-ranging reader interest is, and how it has not been fully served by the severe limitations of traditional publishing: it took a look at the zeitgeist of what readers are searching for, bookwise, online… and it’s not, surprisingly, all John Grisham and Harry Potter:

[H]ere’s our list of most-viewed English language books supplied by our publisher partners for the week of September 17th through 23rd:

• Diversity and Evolutionary Biology of Tropical Flowers
• Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms
• Measuring and Controlling Interest Rate and Credit Risk
• Ultimate Healing: The Power of Compassion
• The Holy Qur’an
• Peterson’s Study Abroad 2006
• Hegemony Or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance
• Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage
• Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense
• Build Your Own All-Terrain Robot

Wow. Who knew there were so many topics we didn’t know we needed to read all about?

(Technorati tags: Google Book Search)

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The publishing and bookselling industries are currently in upheaval as new technologies (like print-on-demand) and new paradigms (like Amazon) are radically changing the way books are produced and moved into readers’ hands. And the revolution has just claimed another casualty: New York City’s beloved independent bookstore Coliseum Books.

From Publishers Weekly:

The 32-year-old Coliseum Books in New York City has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and plans are in place to close the store.

“I don’t see us surviving Chapter 11,” said general manager Richard Urciuoli, who has worked at the store for 25 years. “This location never paid off with the amount of space we have and the book sales we needed to generate.”

Between 1974 and 2002, the store was located slightly north of busy Times Square on Broadway and 57th Street. When a jump in rent forced them to close, the store relocated to a 10,000 sq.-ft. space on 42nd Street, near the New York Public Library.

Even in spite of its famous literary neighbor, which we might assume would bring in plenty of foot traffic interested in books, a destination bookstore could not survive in one of the most literary cities on the planet. Sorry as I am to see one of my own personal favorite bookstores disappear, I think there is a lesson to be found in this news for the future of the book arena, and its one that anyone who reads will recognize:

Readers want more options. We don’t want to be limited to the mere thousands of books that even the widest-ranging bookstore, limited by the simple logistics of shelf space, can carry. We want it all, and we’re going to those places that will give it to us, and shunning those that cannot, no matter how beloved they once were.

(Technorati tags: Coliseum Books)

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POD companies can enable the publishing of a lot more than just traditional manuscripts. Writer for the television show Babylon 5 J. Michael Straczynski has figured that out.

He says he has sold over 18,000 copies of volumes of his scripts, packaged with seven scripts and additional notes in each approximately 450-page volume.

Selling at $40 each through CafePress, Straczynski projects he will do $1.5 million in sales from 14 different volumes.

Read the USA Today article here [via Publisher’s Lunch].

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The 5/15 issue Publisher’s Lunch featured an interesting piece on the death of the independent bookstore, with a link to the article on Slate.com. The mention of print-on-demand and self-publishing technologies is heartening!

Slate features a characteristically pointed piece by George Mason University professor Tyler Cowen that uses Laura Miller’s book Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption as a lens for asking “what are independent bookstores really good for?” Cowen maintains: “Our attachment to independent bookshops is, in part, affectation — a self-conscious desire to belong a particular community (or to seem to). Patronizing indies helps us think we are more literary or more offbeat than is often the case.”

His larger case is two-fold: Chain stores often provide more choice in terms of books available, and better prices, and the real “independent spirit” in bookselling is found on the Internet, where the chains have lost.

Amazon reader reviews, blogs such as Bookslut, and eBay, the world’s largest book auction market, all are flourishing and are doing so outside the reach of the major corporate booksellers.

Print-on-demand and self-publishing technologies are booming. Along with Google and other search engines, they will allow niche titles to persist in our memories for a long time to come. This is the flip side of the same computerization that elevated Wal-Mart and Borders: Information technology brings more voices into book evaluation and supply.

Read Slate.com’s full article here.

Our own editrix MaryAnn Johanson comments on the POD/Internet library phenomenon in her article, “Building the Internet Bookshelf.”

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