BPN 1422 iRex Technologies bancrupt

Earlier this month the Dutch e-reader developer and manufacturer iRex Technologies requested for protection under chapter 11. Since 29 June the company has gone in receivership with a debt of 10 million euro. Martijn Kemps, the lawyer treating the bancruptcyexpectes that iRex will be able to make a new start as many parties have shown interest in the IPR and operational knowledge of the company.

iRex Technologies has been a pioneer in the digital page display technology. It started out as a Philips company which brought the e-Ink display technology from the laboratory to the factory. While e-Ink had debvveloped the principle of the digital page technology, iRex Technologies used the substrate technology of Philips to make a workable ereader. iRex Technology was also the first company to bring a usuable ereader to market, the Iliad.

iRex Technology nested itself in the top of the market, striving after quality and pricing its ereaders high. Competition by manufacturers of cheaper ereaders and marketing setbacks made it not easy for iRex Technologies to conquer a fair market share. Amazon.com talked to iRex Technologies about the production of the Kindle, but did not get to an agreement in the end. Last year iRex Technologies missed the Christmas season sales for which it had teamed up with Barnes & Noble.

Last month the company went into chapter 11 and looked for 2 million euro to bridge the financial gap. However when a regional development banker and the Deutsche Bank broke off talks, the bancruptcy was inevitable.

Tags: ereader, ebook

BPN 1421 Digital paper pioneer iRex in chapter 11

The Eindhoven (The Netherlands) based ereader manufacturer iRex Technologies has gone into a comparable situation as chapter 11 last Tuesday. The company has cash problems as US sales have been delayed.

Last year iRex Technologies announced a deal with the bookstore chain Barnes & Noble and the online shop Best Buy. The ereader DR800SG customised for the US market with 3G functionality and a touch screen was supposed to reach the stores by the Christmas season. However, the Federal an inspection Communications Commission (FCC) took more time for inspection of the device than hoped for and iRex Technologies missed the season sales. As a replacement Barnes & Noble launched the Nook at the end of October 2009. In the end also the Best Buy deal did not work out as foreseen.

The CEO of iREX Technologies, a Philips spin-off, incorporated in Luxembourg, claims that the position of the company is not hopeless. The company has a problem with cash flow and banks are not really accommodating. However, the CEO Mr Brons still hopes that the situation will be solved.

iRex Technologies was the first manufacturer to appear on the market with an ereader based on the e-Ink display technology in 2006. The US has been the target market for iRex Technologies from the beginning. In comparison to the multilingual Europe, the US is a homogeneous market with many nationals reading the languages English and Spanish. However, the company was unable to sell its ereader with the Mobypocket reader to Amazon and had to settle for Barnes & Noble.

In Europe iRex Technologies has not made many inroads. In its home country The Netherlands, the company was unable to organise a marketing action with the book and newspaper publishers. It has had sporadic projects. The national quality paper NRC Handelsblad started cooperation, but no other paper followed due to the high price and technical problems. A project with the bookstore chain Selexyz was not a success; having been selling more brands of ereaders, Selexyz now has signed with Samsung for the E60 ereader. The company missed the Dutch market completely when the Dutch bookpublishers adopted the EPUB standard instead of Amazon’s Mobypocket and Sony with a cheaper ereader made a deal with the online bookstore Bol.com.

Tags: ereader, ebook

BPN 1393 Barnes seeks nook in e-reader market

The bookshop chain Barnes & Noble with 1300 retail stores had already announced its rentree into the e-book; it had also announced that it would launch its own e-reader. Now the announcement is official and the e-reader, named the Nook (meaning a secluded place or space), can be pre-ordered at 259 US dollar to be delivered in November. The device has two outstanding features: a six-inch reading display and a colour touch-screen display with virtual keyboard and the option to pass on an e-book to another device or lend out e-books to one another. Now the battle for the Christmas season sales between the Kindles of Amazon.com and the Nook can start.

The e-reader is 7,7 x 4,9 x 0,5 inches and weighs 317 grams. So its thin and very portable. It has the most advanced E-ink electronic paper display, which can be reads in bright sunlight and inside. It has also a 3.5 inch colour touch screen LCD with one touch control and navigation. It downloads e-books via AT&T, the nation's fastest 3G network and Wi-Fi ( 802.11 b/g). In Barnes & Noble stores e-book previews can be downloaded for free. The Nook has a memory of 2GB or approximately 1500 eBooks. An expandable microSD can be slotted in so that you can buy an extra 16 GB memory card and store up to 17,500 books (more books on one card than in the library of the Paris based university Sorbonne in 1750!). The Nook can also hold 26 hours of MP3 audio. A battery life of ten days reading is predicted, but also a recharging time of 3,5 hours. As to the format of e-books, Nook uses the EPUB format and can use other e-Reader formats. PDFs, MP3s and graphics can be loaded to the Nook from a computer or from and a micro SD card. JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP files can also be used.

Two features are outstanding in the device: the screen and the lending facility:
- the screen looks like a composite of digital paper with a colour LCD screen. As such this composite screen does not look ideal and might generate technical problems, but it heralds the colour electronic display;
- the lending facility is new to the English speaking world. According to the New York Times the lending facility is limited to one transfer for a fortnight, either between the Nook and another reading device like the iPhone or between the owner of a Nook and another person with a reading device. It looks like a great concession, but it is in fact very limitative as in The Netherlands Sony is using the EPUB format and offering lending facilities to four devices or persons.

Barnes & Noble was in the pre-electronic paper era already selling e-books, but gave up the adventure as the e-book sales were slow. But with the improvement of electronic paper Barnes & Noble is stepping into the e-book fray almost five years after the launch of the Sony Librié. But this time the prospects look better than ever. Barnes & Noble is in time with the launch of the Nook for the Christmas sales season. And the Nook makes a good chance to become a hit. The Nook looks to be top of the bill as far as state of art technology. Barnes & Noble has a book portfolio of 700.000 e-books. People can lend an e-book to a friend for a fortnight. And the price of the e-reader is competitive with the Kindles of Amazon.com and in fact with many other e-readers. Also publishers will be more pleased with Barnes & Noble than with Amazon.com. Barnes & Noble offers publishers 55 percent of the revenue, while Amazon.com asks 60 percent. The Nook will be sold only in the US (so I do not have to search the nooks of the apartment for my Christmas present). Let the battle begin!

Blog Posting Number: 1393

Tags: e-book, e-reader

BPN 1392 Frankfurt Book Fair: no e-book excitement

The annual pilgimage for publishers to the Frankfurter Book Fair is over. On this largest book grail publishers walk kilometers, select potential books to be translated and talk about the latest developments in the sector over a beer or a good dinner. And the e-reader definitely was on the menu of the item list. The marketing bureau Forrester forcated a sale of 1 million e-readers in the Christmas season, followed by sales of 6 million e-readers next year. And Google announced that Google Editions will start distributing e-books in the first half year of next year. But how much whipped cream wsa in these announcements?

Concretely there is some action on the e-readers front. Barnes & Noble will re-join the fray. And Amazon will launch a global English-language Kindle with wireless 3G access through AT&T in more than 100 countries. And Google has announced In my home country The Netherlands the Kindle will (finally) be available on October 19, 2009. Amazon will not have Dutch titles available yet; but the portfolio starts with the US offer and the European offer, read UK offer, probably with a small selection of French and German titles. The e-reader will be available at 185 euro, just a fraction cheaper than the cheapest Sony device. Besides subscribers to the Kindle will have to pay 99 eurocents for every megabyte transmitted. The offer looks too little, too late, as Sony has teamed up with the internet bookshop Bol.com and is well on its way with their introduction.

Not only in The Netherlands, but also in Europe Kindle will have a hard time. Publishing e-books in foreign languages is not yet popular with publishers as there is no real demand for it. In Europe there is still a culture of ink sniffing. No books without ink.

Google will start distributing between the 600.000 and 800.000 e-books. This portfolio will partly exist of public domain book of which the copyrights are no longer valid., and partly of books, to which Google has been licensed. Google will keep 55 percent of the sales price (Amazon keeps 60 percent).

Should we be impressed by the potential sales figures? The sale of 6 million e-readers is impressive, but still small in terms of demography worldwide and even of the US. It is a start. But publishers and certainly foreign language book publishers will remain careful.

Blog Posting Number: 1392

Tags: e-book, e-reader

BPN 1361 eReader war coming up in the USA

So far Amazon.com was dominating the US eReader and eBook market, overruling Sony who was the first player on the US market. But now it gets competition from Barnes & Noble. And in the wings Hearst is still waiting. Only Sony is present in the European market.

The book chain Barnes & Nobles (B&N) returns to eBooks. From 2001 till 2003 it was offering eBooks, but it stopped trading them due to a lack lustre market. The book chain will now return with a vengeance. The eBook shop will serve the whole eBook market. It has a portfolio with 700.000 eBooks, of which half a million public domain titles. However it promises 1,25 million eBooks titles by next year. It will keep the books down to 9,99 US dollar. B&N will serve the whole spectre of eBook readers. Barnes and Nobles will have its own exclusive ultra thin 8.5 x 11 inch wireless eReader, to be produced by Plastic Logic, exclusively for B&N. The book chain will also exclusively deliver books to Plastic Logic. And it has already eReader software for the iPhone, iPOD, Blackberry’s and smart phones. Also PCs and Mac computers can download the B&N books. The books will be delivered in the ePUB format, setting it aside of Amazon and Sony; the books can not be printed. The eBook portfolio includes DRM-free books from Fictionwise’s catalogue. Designed with the book reader in mind, B&N eReader client software provides an easy-to- use interface to access the B&N Bookstore and to manage their personal eBook libraries. It features powerful tools to optimize the reading experience, including the ability to modify type size and font and annotate and bookmark text, as well as an innovative auto-scroll feature enabling users hands free reading. In addition, users can shift from reading their eBook from a smartphone while commuting to a notebook PC or eReader device at bedtime.

The B&N re-entry will be a shock to Amazon. The company has been a long reseller of eBooks. Since 2007 it has launched the Kindle and sold 500.000 units of the Kindle eReader. This eReader has now three versions, which can hold 1.500 eBooks. Amazon has 275,000 titles are available in the Kindle format. Recently, Amazon’s CEO Bezos claimed that for every three print copies it also sells one Kindle e-book. The total sales of Amazon of eBooks, eReaders and devices will reach 1.2 billion US dollar by 2010.

The re-entry of B&N is not a surprise. In March 2009 B&N acquired eBook seller Fictionwise for $15.7 million in cash. Fictionwise, which runs a trio of sites, Fictionwise, eReader and eBookwise, operates as a standalone business unit under founders Scott and Steve Pendergrast. First-time users of the eReader will have the opportunity to download free eBooks, including titles such as Merriam-Webster’s Pocket Dictionary, Sense and Sensibility, Little Women, Last of the Mohicans, Pride and Prejudice, and Dracula.

The re-entry of B&N will have an impact on the US eBook scene. B&N is a big print book player in the US and the UK and its contact with publishers is more symbiotic than that of Amazon and Sony. B&N promises a larger portfolio of eBooks than Amazon en Sony; despite the half a million public domain titles from Google, it will have 750.000 titles by next year. And as B&N will officially start its bookshop in September of this year, it will be ahead of the publisher Hearst, which is supposed to launch a large display eReader in the fall. There will be a real competition in the US market by the Christmas season.

So far B&N has announced to limit its eBook market to the US, leaving Europe aside like Amazon and most likely Hearst. So far only Sony is active in the UK and some larger European countries. A host of eReaders from several European countries are trying to gain local market. A fight is said to be brewing in Germany between Vodafone and T-Telecom as well as txtr. Also in France some eReader designers are fighting for a piece of the market. In the Netherlands BeBook is fighting Irex eReaders.

Blog Posting Number: 1361

Tags: eReader, eBook