BLOG The year of the ebook

Do you have an ebook reader? What about reading novels on your mobile phone? Blogger Lee Harris believes the tipping point has come, and today he delivers the first in a series of discussions about ebooks as a format.

The Year Of The eBook

I’ve been thinking about ebooks a lot, lately, and way people view the format. I’ve been reading ebooks in one form or another for well over seven years, and I publish and market them both professionally and as a past-time, so while I would not lay claim to being an expert in the field, I do have a lot of experience with them.

Reading ebooks is nothing new, of course. An ebook, after all, is just some text on a screen. We’ve all read one in one form or another – articles on websites (including this blog) are ebooks at their most basic, though when most people think of the word ebook, they generally think of novels, or short story collections.

Over the next couple of blogs I’m going to look at ebooks in a little more detail – I’ll touch on the various formats (though only briefly – it’s really quite dull), and I’ll go into a little more detail on some of the ebook readers on the market (from dedicated devices such as the Sony PRS505 and CoolEr through to multi-function equipment such as the iPhone or other PDA). I’ll also touch on the pricing issue (both for the equipment used to read the ebooks, and the price of the ebooks themselves), and ways in which you can buy/otherwise acquire ebooks.

What I’d really like to look at, though, is the passion that the format inspires – both in dedicated ebook geeks like myself, as well as the passion against the format and the technology used. I’m even going to loan an eReader to one of my bibliophile friends for a few weeks, to see if they feel the same way after using it, as they do now.

2009 is the year of the ebook. This is when ebooks begin to enter the mainstream. With new dedicated devices appearing seemingly every other week, and new ways to read them on existing devices, not to mention the (rumoured) launch of the Amazon Kindle in the UK in three months’ time.

The next blog in this short series will look at the dedicated device versus the multi-function machine. Which is better, and why?

In the meantime, if you have any thoughts or questions you’d like addressed in a future blog, drop them into the comments section, below.

This is a personal article by Lee Harris, one of our site contributors. Are you an ebook fan? Do you have questions about formats or devices? Your thoughts and queries for Lee are welcome as always.