BPN 1210 Sony e-reader in UK

Today the Sony PRS505 arrives in the UK. It is an important moment for the UK and for the European continent. Sony will cooperate with Waterstone’s chain with 60 book shops. The occasion will also be sought by publishers to release electronic editions of their print books; noticeably Penguin has promised 5000 e-books.

The Sony PRS505 will not be officially introduced on the European continent. Regional Sony companies are free to introduce the e-reader and make agreements with local or regional publishers. In small countries the PRS505 will not actively be promoted, but project proposals will be honoured.

The introduction of Sony’s PRS505 in Europe is remarkable. For years kept the Librié e-reader only on sale in Japan. After this, Sony introduced the e-reader in the USA. In the States it met opposition of Amazon’s Kindle and to a lesser extent of the iLiad.

With the introduction of the Sony e-reader in the UK, Sony will find another chequered battlefield. Before Sony’s introduction only iRex Technologies had its wireless edition of the iLiad on the market. But recently iRex Technologies introduced an iLiad without the wireless facility. This edition will be the flagship of Border’s book distribution. Sony will not meet Amazon’s Kindle in the UK, yet. But it I expected that Amazon will have a European edition by next year. Amazon is said to be working on a German edition of the Kindle, which will be introduced in Germany in the first half of next year. (Amazon has denied that it is working on a student edition of the Kindle). In France Amazon’s Kindle will meet competition by Ganaxa and Cybook Bookeen.

By introducing the e-reader earlier than Kindle, Sony has prevented a monopoly by Amazon in the UK. Sony will distribute the e-reader, but not e-books. Amazon sells Kindle in the US together with e-books, charging publishers a commission of 60 percent of the sales price. In the UK the publishers can deal with (e-)book distributors like Waterstone’s and Border’s as well as Amazon. In Europe, it looks like Amazon will be able to strike in Germany. In France Amazon will have a hard time, given its national chauvinism for products, produced in France.

Blog Posting Number: 1209

Tags: e-book, e-reader

BPN 1155 French telco SFR in e-readers

While I was in Paris a lot of e-reader news came out in France. I knew that the tenth e-reader round table Rencontres Tebaldo was held on July 8. But being back at my desk, I read that the telecom company SFR (Société Française de Radiotéléphonie) had started a pilot with the wireless e-reader GeR2, adapted for the new Ganaxa publishing platform on July 4. The screen of the e-reader is digital paper and is six inches in diameter like a page of a pocket book. The format is of a pocket book (18,8 cm x 11,8 cm x 0,85 cm) and very light (175 grams). It will stay charged for 10 to 15 days and reloads in three hours. The pilot carried out by SFR is on the new telecom and developing open platform, developed by Ganaxa the GPP (Ganaxa Publishing Platform), for the press, publishers and advertisers, integrating tools for creation, production, diffusion, consultation and display. The e-reader device works won a bluetooth module which connects to the mobile. In turn this mobile link up with the network 3G/3G+ of SFR.

And it looks like SFR has learned basic lessons on introducing e-readers. With the e-reader it offers seven major press titles of press (Les Echos, Le Monde, L’Equipe, Le Parisien, Le Figaro and L’AFP) as well as books from seven major publishers large actors of the world of (Dunod, Flammarion, Hachette, M21 éditions, Plon, Ramsay, Solar).

SFR wants to have 100 test users. They must be clients of SFR. They will have access to the contents of the daily editions of the newspapers and t the ten recent books (romance, biographies, guides,…). The content will be protected by a system of DRM. Each machine has a single serial number; the readers are thus identified and the files containing the works are encrypted so that only the identified readers can download them. It is neither possible to transfer a downloaded work to another e-reader or another platform.

The pilot is to test, in particular, the ergonomics of the product, its use in situations of mobility and the relevance of the content offer. The lessons drawn from the pilot will make it possible for SFR to adapt the device and content offer before the launch in September.

The SFR e-reader is the third e-reader after the iLiad and Kindle with wireless facilities and the first Bluetooth equipped device. SFR is the first company to launch a full-fledged pilot, bringing a group of newspaper and book publishers in from the start. This will educate publishers in one go and yield a lot of publicity for the pilot as well as a lot of user experiences. A really smart move.

Blog Posting Number: 1155

Tags: e-reader, e-book, DRMe-reader, e-book, DRM

Digital paper seminar in Paris

Last night upon my return from Salzburg (the flight was okay; thank you) and before my flight to Tampere (Finland tomorrow, I found a message, in French, in my mailbox from Bruno Rives of Tebaldo. In the mail he announced the seventh edition of the Tebaldo Round table this time on Electronic Paper for communications, strategies and risks, to be held in Paris on 26 October, 2007.

This sounds interesting. After the introduction of two e-reader versions for the French financial newspaper Les Echos, it is interesting to see that a seminar with a wider scope than only Les Echos is devoted to the subject. During the seminar a presentation will be given about the place of the novel on an e-reader by an editor of the publishing house Flammarion. Bruno Rives himself will present the State of art and take the case of Les Echos to talk about economic models. Another speaker will talk about the place of the e-readers for the press projects and editors. A representative of Ganaxa will talk about the announced project in Japan and China. There will also be an introduction to the architectures, preparation and continuous production.

There will be more presentations on the use and experimentations in this field for the press, editors and libraries. There will be a presentation of the GeR2 e-reader of Ganaxa, digital paper as a large sheet, the development of digital paper and colours and the flexible digital paper from Samsung, Polymer Vision, Fujitsu and E-Ink.

It really looks like a very interesting seminar. But it is in France (I will have to travel again), it is in French (read French, but speak a little tourist French) and it will take two days of travelling. Yet I am very tempted to go.

For more information and the registration form:
http://www.tebaldo.com/seminaires.htm

Blog Posting Number: 882

Tags: digital paper, electronic book, e-readerdigital paper, electronic book, e-book, e-reader