Book lovers finally picking up e-books

COULD book lovers finally be willing to switch from paper to pixels?

For a decade, consumers mostly ignored electronic book devices, which were often hard to use and offered few popular items to read. But this year, in part because of the popularity of Amazon.com's wireless Kindle device, the e-book has started to take hold.

The US$359 ($517) Kindle, which is slim, white and about the size of a trade paperback, was introduced a year ago. Although Amazon will not disclose sales figures, the Kindle has at least lived up to its name by creating broad interest in electronic books. Now it is out of stock and unavailable until February. Analysts credit Oprah Winfrey, who praised the Kindle on her show in October, and blame Amazon for poor holiday planning.

The shortage is providing an opening for Sony, which has embarked on an intense publicity campaign for its 'Reader' device during the gift-buying season. The stepped-up competition may represent a coming of age for the entire idea of reading longer texts on a portable digital device.

"The perception is that e-books have been around for 10 years and haven't done anything," said Steve Haber, president of Sony's digital reading division. "But its happening now. This is really starting to take off."

Sony's efforts have been overshadowed by Amazon's. This month, however, it began a promotional blitz in airports, train stations and bookstores, with the ambitious goal of personally demonstrating the Reader to two million people by the end of the year.

Its latest model, the 'Reader 700', is a US$400 device with a reading light and a touch screen that allows users to annotate what they are reading. Haber said Sony's sales had tripled this holiday season over last, in part because the device is now available in the Target, Borders and Sams Club chains. He said Sony had sold more than 300,000 devices since the debut of the original Reader in 2006.

It is difficult to quantify the success of the Kindle, since Amazon will not disclose how many it has sold and analysts estimates vary widely. Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, a book market research company, said he believed Amazon had sold as many as 260,000 units through the beginning of October, before Oprah Winfrey's endorsement. Others say the number could be as high as a million.

Many Kindle buyers appear to be outside the usual gadget-hound demographic. Almost as many women as men are buying it, Hildick-Smith said. So far, publishers like HarperCollins, Random House and Simon & Schuster say that sales of e-books for any device including simple laptop downloads constitute less than one per cent of total book sales. However, there are signs of momentum; the publishers say sales of e-books have tripled or quadrupled in the last year.

Amazon's Kindle version of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, a best seller recommended by Winfrey's book club, now represents 20 per cent of total Amazon sales of the book, according to Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide.

The Kindle version of the book, which can be downloaded by the device itself through its wireless modem, costs US$9.99 in the Amazon Kindle store.

The Reader version costs US$11.99 from Sony's e-book library, accessible from an Internet-connected computer.

Ebooks will become the go-to-first format for an ever-expanding group of readers who are newly discovering how much they enjoy reading books on a screen, said Markus Dohle, chief executive of Random House, the world's largest publisher of consumer books.

Nobody knows how much consumer habits will shift. Some of the most committed bibliophiles maintain an almost fetishistic devotion to the physical book. The technology, however, may have more appeal for certain groups, like heavy readers.

Perhaps the most overlooked boost to ebooks this year and a challenge to some of the standard thinking about them came from Apples do-it-all gadget, the iPhone.Publishers say these iPhone applications are already starting to generate nearly as many digital book sales as the Sony Reader, though they still trail sales of books in the Kindle format. Meanwhile, the quest to build the perfect ebook reader continues. Amazon and Sony are to introduce new versions in 2009. The New York Times