Book Buzz

As we are booklovers in every sense of the word we like to keep you informed with the latest buzz around all that has to do with books; new book releases, authors in the news, handy tools, book meetings, book clubs, anything.

If you have some interesting book related news you like to share, let us know. Send an email to info@bookhampers.com.au and we will put your news item on our Buzz page.

Happy reading!

October 2009 

September 2009 

Introducing : the BeBook 'Mini'.

A sexy petite eReader joined the BeBook family. At a very competitive price!

Smaller, faster, more convenience!
The BeBook 'Mini' is an electronic book reader that lets you read digital content anywhere and everywhere, just like you used to do on it's big brother, the original BeBook 'One'.

With its 5 inch E-Ink screen, the readable area is just 1 inch (appr. 2,5 cm) smaller across.
This ensures optimal portability and readability at the same time. The new 8-level greyscale screen approximates the experience of reading printed text. This eReader fits in any handbag or even inside the pocket of your suit. Taking your entire library along on the 160 gram light BeBook has never been easier!

The BeBook 'Mini' has a fast 400mhz Arm processor for fast page turning and a convenient thumb wheel for even more reading convenience.

Adobe DRM support for ePub and PDF format.
With the integrated Adobe ® Reader Mobile software you will be able to purchase and download the latest book titles with the click of a button. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is implemented for the two most popular eBook formats: ePub and PDF. Most online bookstores offer books in at least one of these formats, this gives you the opportunity to shop around for the best deals on books.

Open file format / open source: unrivalled number of file formats supported. The BeBook 'Mini' has the largest number of supported file formats, unrivalled by any of the current eReaders :

ePub,,PDF, doc, html, bmp, jpg, png, gif, tif, djvu, fb2, wol, txt, ppt, pdb, lit*, chm, rar, zip, mp3, mobi*, prc*, htm and mbp are all supported. (*=non DRM). Almost every text file format you throw at it can be read by this small but powerful eReader.

Expandable memory and add-ons. Through it's built in SD card slot and USB 2.0 connection it's possible to expand the memory of your BeBook 'Mini'. Just insert any SD memory card and you can add up to 16GB of memory. This way you can keep your work and other documents apart, using just one reader. The SD card slot can also be used for future add-ons like a WIFI module.

Affordable E-Ink reader for everyone. At an entry level of just $389, the BeBook 'Mini' eReader offers the best value for money: affordable, expandable and a wide range of supported file formats. Even Text to speech is offered for the most popular file formats (English only)

Ebooks on the rise
WHEN the first really influential wave of the e-book revolution hits Australia -- and estimates run at that being in a year to 18 months -- it will be the novelty value of a new gadget that will give it impetus.

For people who love to run their thumbs over a small screen, scrolling through text and images, adding sound, changing colours, switching sources, the e-book may fill up so much space on the mental shelf marked "reading" that there will be little room left for conventional books.

If Australia's experience with the mobile phone is any guide, the take-up rate will be swift, though it is taking a long time for any reasonably priced form of e-book reading device to make it to this country.

Some people make the case for the mobile phone becoming the device of choice for downloading everything, including books. Others claim the dedicated reading device will soon be so attractive and versatile it will be as common as iPods. Everyone is guessing or, as Random House's marketing director Brett Osmond puts it, "no one knows what the future will be", but the evidence is mounting -- in sales -- that the electronic format is appealing to more and more readers. The stakes are high and exceed mere economic considerations. There are those who believe the fabric of humanism, the great ideology woven out of Enlightenment thinking, will be rent deep if technology makes the bookobsolete.

According to Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, what we need to consider goes far beyond convenient gadgets. If we replace print with screen-based text, "we will not simply have replaced one delivery system with another", Birkerts wrote recently in US magazine The Atlantic. "We will also have modified our imagination of history, our understanding of the causal and associative relationships of ideas and their creators."

Just so, says New York-based Bob Stein, who was in Brisbane recently to speak at the Ideas Festival and to give his blessing to the Brisbane Writers Centre to set up a branch of his Institute for the Future of the Book. But that, for this radical publisher, will be a good thing. "If you think about the book as an object made of printed pages, there is no future for the book, and it's an uninteresting discussion," Stein says.

"What's more interesting is to try to understand what role a book plays in our lives. I'm evolving my definition, but the middle definition, which dates from when I started the institute five years ago, was that the book is a vehicle humans use to move ideas around time and space. In all these conversations about the book, what makes it difficult to talk about what's coming is to get over people's attachment to what was. One of the hardest things is separating out the nostalgia."

Stein confesses he is an impatient reader but nevertheless says he has some sympathy for those who are appalled at the premise that the book, in its present printed form, is doomed. He compares the book as a form with architecture that is no longer possible to build.

"I love gothic churches and I'm sorry we don't build them any more, but we don't," he says. "They've served their function and so has the 800-page novel. It was really cool, the novel, and I've spent a lot of time curled up with good ones, but new technologies give rise to new forms. Humans were not born with a gene that made us gravitate to print."

Stein's position, even among those who are keen to see how electronic technology will change publishing and reading, is extreme.

According to Osmond, the novel or other form of text, as we know it, will not change but the way we read it will expand to include electronic technologies. "There is a school of thought that e-books may actually create more demand for the paper version," Osmond says. "In the future you may simply buy the book and you are able to read it in a range of formats. You might begin with the paper version, then take a chapter on your e-reader while you're walking the dog or pick it up on your computer. We are aware, because of the news coming out of the (US), that there is a market waiting."

Every Australian publisher is dabbling, more or less, in the e-book market, but even Allen & Unwin, which is perhaps the most advanced in its preparation for what everyone knows is coming, is forced to watch and wait for crucial developments to unfold.

"Formats for e-books will be determined on an international level, at least for the English language world," Allen & Unwin publisher Elizabeth Weiss says. "There's very little point in trying to establish a local standard for Australia. Whatever we do here needs to be connected to the international e-book market."

At the moment, if you were interested in downloading a book instead of buying a paper version, you would probably have to purchase a PDF file, which would come to you like a long cumbersome text file, possible to read only by the most dedicated and tolerant. Hand-held reading devices are available here, but they are very expensive. Osmond is trying out a $1000 reader he says he doesn't dare to take outside in case he damages it, which, of course, destroys the portability function and makes e-books appear ridiculously precious alongside paperbacks.

Weiss says there is anecdotal evidence that Australians are beginning to use handheld devices such as iPhones to download e-books. While all eyes are on Amazon's aggressive marketing of the Kindle (which locks readers into buying their downloads from Amazon), Sony is having what Weiss calls a "significant impact" on book buying in Britain with its e-book Reader. Sony in Australia say it is close but not yet ready to market a similar device here because there are still too many questions about what formats will become standard and how those formats will be purchased by users.

Now, if you do buy an e-book from an Australian publisher as a PDF or for use on a reading device, you are likely to pay the same price as for a paper version of the book, partly because the implications for author royalties have not been worked out yet.

"We are already seeing price competition in international markets," Weiss says, pointing to Amazon's strategy to undercut almost all booksellers by pricing its e-books at $US9.99. Sony has responded by discounting publishers' recommended e-book retail prices, bringing its prices close to Amazon's Kindle price. While all this sorts itself out among the big players in the e-book sales arena, Weiss says there is one thing we can be sure of: "There are costs associated with e-books and claims they should be free or cost virtually nothing are misguided.

"Even if printing and physical distribution costs are removed, authors still need to be paid, and books still need to be edited and promoted, and there are costs associated with file management and distribution," she says.

Even that is being questioned, however. Jacob Weisberg, writing in online magazine Slate about how Kindle will change the world, says that while books are not likely to suffer from the transition to electronic reading, publishers may well disappear or radically change not just their function but their identity. He points out that Stephen King already bypasses the traditional paths and publishes straight on Amazon.

"In the future, it (Amazon) could become the only publisher a best-selling author needs," Weisberg writes. Instead of the big publishers providing editing and "cultural arbitration" services, a "lighter-weight model of publishing" will emerge, Weisberg predicts: "clever kids working from coffee shops in Brooklyn".

Such predictions match Stein's prognosis that a text, slowly created by an author who then hands it over to a publisher for another slow process to turn it into a book, will become obsolete once reading devices become common.

"Instead of a physical object, the book will become an art object, only something that people with money can afford," Stein says. "There is an aesthetic function to the book that the electronic version cannot do, but on the other hand e-books can do things print books can't do, such as search text strings or effortlessly do a Google search to follow a thought I have while I'm reading."

Stein does add, however, that "there are veryfew things I want to read available in electronic form".

Weiss agrees that the book is an "aesthetic object", but suggests it is too good a technology, in its printed form, to disappear as Stein is predicting. "Consumers are slower to take up e-books because there is still value in the printed book," she says.

Publishers in Australia, forced into a holding pattern while they wait for the development of low-cost and flexible reading devices, are also trying to address complex questions of copyright and royalty payments. "Anyone who creates content, or has a responsibility to the creators of that content, is a bit nervous that we don't give away the jewels for nothing," Osmond says. "We'd do a disservice to authors if we did that."

Even Stein, who says it's foolish to try to resist the digitalisation of books because it's going to happen, says it's too early to see how it will all work. He holds up his mobile phone, the screen displaying lines of text from a pulp novel he has downloaded for free, and says he has been reading a lot of that kind of book on his phone. Why? "I don't have an answer to why," he says, after staring at simple text on the little screen for a few moments. "I don't want to pay $10 to have a book in this form, but I'm totally happy to read things for free here. But the moment someone comes up with a trade paperback-sized reader that has a full colour screen and that is effortlessly connected to the internet ..."

News source: The Weekend Australian, 11 April 2009

Additional info on ereaders:

Various models are now on the market: Amzon's Kindle, Iliad, Hanlin V3, Bebook from Endless Ideas and the Cybook. 

Bo, The First Famiy's dog
The First Family's new dog, Bo, is to star in his own picture book. Bo, America's Commander in Leash, it will be published next week by Mascot Books, a small independent publisher from Virginia in the US.

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The Kindle is now available in Australia but buying e-books here may still be problematic, writes Dan Kaufman.

It's finally happened. After years of speculation, Amazon is releasing the Kindle, its hand-held device that lets people read e-books, in Australia. Orders can be placed now on Amazon's website and Kindles will apparently be shipped from October 19. But before you hand over the cash, you might want to consider a few issues.

The first is the question of which books will be available on it for Australians. The chief executive of the Australian Booksellers Association, Malcolm Neil, is sceptical about the quantity of books that can be legally downloaded.

"I can buy it [the Kindle] but once I've bought it I'll suffer the same frustrations I'll suffer if I have any other device at the moment and that's the content for the Kindle is still locked into the American market," Neil says. "So if you try to buy The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown for the Kindle edition from the Amazon.com website, it's not available to an Australian customer.

"So they're not actually servicing the Australian market, they're just making the Kindle available to Australia and some of their titles are available as well."

The availability of e-books here has always been a problem. At the moment, there are hundreds of out-of-copyright books you can legally download from sites such as Gutenberg.org but when it comes to new titles, the only major retailer in Australia is Dymocks, which has been quietly selling both e-books and e-readers that rival the Kindle since 2007. Whether Amazon will significantly increase the number of e-books Australians can buy is yet to be seen.

Another issue is file formats, which might sound boring but can restrict what you read further. Dymocks sells books in the Adobe PDF format while other publishers around the world are increasingly supporting the ePub format.

In contrast, the Kindle uses the proprietary AZW format and the unprotected Mobipocket MOBI and PRC formats. In other words, if you buy an Australian book here, there's a chance you won't be able to read it on your Kindle (to be exact, Kindle does read PDFs but calls it an experimental feature, saying complex PDFs may not format correctly on it). If you do buy an e-reader, we suggest you look for one that supports as many different file formats as possible (see breakout).

Thirdly, you don't want to end up with the Betamax of e-readers – and with so many companies entering the market it's hard to tell who will succeed and what alliances will be formed.

Apple is rumoured to be releasing a tablet PC that functions as an e-reader early next year and Microsoft created a prototype tablet (or booklet, since it has two screens) called Courier, judging from a video that was leaked online.

In the meantime, ASUS unveiled a dual-screen colour e-reader at CeBIT earlier this year; Sony signed a deal with Marvel Comics (and is in talks with other comic publishers) to let PSP users read electronic comic books by the end of this year, with other content, including novels, expected next year; and Nintendo released a collection of classic book titles for its DS hand-held console. iPhone, Blackberry and other mobile users can already download e-readers to work on their phones.

The display technology these e-readers use is an important consideration. While the Kindle and its ilk use E Ink, a technology that recreates the look of ink on a page (see graphic), multi-function devices such as the PSP are sticking to LCD screens. Unlike LCD screens, E Ink doesn't use backlighting so is less strenuous on the reader's eyes.

What isn't in question is that e-books are rapidly becoming big business. In the US, e-book sales are now triple what they were last year, according to the International Digital Publishing Forum and, while Dymocks sells about 15,000 e-books a year, the general manager of retail operations and marketing at Dymocks, Joanne Wood, expects this to grow.

"One day we want to have a kiosk in every one of our stores where you can go in, buy a book in the printed version or put your USB stick [in and] download it to your device and you walk away happy with a bag full of books and an e-reader full of books," Wood says.

A range of alternatives

Aside from the Kindle, which costs $US279 ($313) from Amazon.com for the 6-inch (15.24-centimetre) model, there are a range of E Ink devices available in Australia. For starters there's the BeBook (bebook.net.au), which costs $389 for the 5-inch (12.7-centimetre) model and $499 for the 6-inch (15.24-centimetre) model. The BeBook's interface is simple (don't expect iPhone-style interactivity) but the screen display is fantastic and it can read a range of file formats including PDF and ePub.

Then you have the E Ink devices available from Dymocks, which range in price from $599 to $1299. We tried the iLiad Book Edition with an 8.1-inch (20.5-centimetre) screen ($1099). The screen quality isn't noticeably different to the BeBook's but the size is larger, the interface more polished and it has a touch screen that works with a pen stylus.

We also tried both the iPod Touch and the Nintendo DS as e-readers. The Nintendo DS would seem to be ideal because of its dual screens but the text is just far too pixellated for our liking. The iPod Touch is better because of its crisper screen (although it's still not as easy to read as an E Ink display) and there are multiple applications available that let you read books on it such as Stanza (lexcycle.com). Those who own a BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian or Palm device can use the Mobipocket reader (mobipocket.com).

However, portable e-readers still only account for a fraction of the e-book market. "The most popular device for reading e-books in Australia is the laptop computer, followed by the desktop computer," the managing director of EBooks Corporation, Stephen Cole, says.

This gels with statistics from market research firm Simba Information, which claims smartphones and dedicated reading devices make up only 5 per cent of e-book users.

Source: SMH 13/10/2009

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Australia finally opens it's doors to the ebook and ereader market.

It seems that the ereaders are now coming to Australia. Recently opened ereadershop www.ereadersRus.com.au has a wide variety of ereaders and ereader accessories.