International Digital Publishing Forum – Digital Book 2009 Event

May 12, 2009 at 9:48 pm | In eBooks | 3 Comments
Tags: Amazon, conference, digital book 2009, e-book reader, e-books, EPUB, IDPF, International Digital Publishing Forum, Kindle, Public libraries, Sony Reader, Twitter

For the past two days, the IDPF have been holding a conference entitled ‘Digital Book 2009′ in New York. As you would expect, the event has been accompanied by some live tweeting from the conference itself….and some interesting tweets they were too. Amongst some of the more interesting tweets is news that Sony are working on a wireless reading device. This could be a very interesting development, particularly considering the delay in the release of the Kindle over here (we haven’t even got v1.0 and the US media is already talking about v3.0!!). Should Sony get this out quick, it will pretty much own a sizeable chunk of the UK market and make it very difficult for Amazon’s Kindle to compete.

Another interesting revelation was the impact that ebooks have had in public libraries. A representative from Brooklyn public library has revealed that ebooks have overtaken audio books in terms of issues. This underlines that despite the common view that ebooks are a threat and not an opportunity, ebooks in libraries have proved to be a popular alternative to other formats. It certainly doesn’t appear to suggest that ebooks will be the library killer that some people would lead you to believe.

There have been many other interesting developments (like Acrobat export from PDF to the EPUB format) and there are sure to be more to come. Meanwhile, you can follow the event itself via the Twitter hashtag #idpf09 either on Twitter itself or on the quite wonderful Twitterfall.

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After the conference, I was standing with a Teleread blogger and a Sony competitor. They noted that Howard Stringer had said almost the exact same words about wireless development more than a year ago and decided Sony was only saying, “Yes, adding wireless is an obvious thing to consider” and not “Yes, a wireless ereader is in the works.”

Roger S

Comment by Roger S — May 13, 2009 #

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That’s a bit disappointing if they haven’t developed their position over the past year. I really think that they would be on to a good thing if they could launch a wireless reader before the Kindle hits the European market. The competition would be a good thing if nothing else.

Comment by Ian — May 13, 2009 #

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- Btw, I checked with Paul Biba of Teleread and he pointed out that it wasn’t Howard Stringer but “the boss of” Robert Nell, the Sony presenter at IDPF and afaict the head of the Reader operation. This was when Sony announced the 700 — seven and a half months ago (I thought it was longer ago than that). Might not be as uninformative a response as I first thought.
  
  Roger S
  
  Comment by Roger S — May 14, 2009 #
  
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