The eBook Is Really Here

Tue, 07/28/2009 - 06:09 by Greg Sterling

Quick: how many ebook readers will there be in the market next year? Five? Six? Seven? Indeed:

Putting aside the iPod Touch and the rumored Apple tablet, there are at least five competitors going after this growing market. The WSJ looks at the new entry from Samsung, the SNE-50K ebook device, formerly called Papyrus, which is not available outside South Korea for the immediate future:

Samsung's reader is slim at nine millimeters and weighs 6.5 ounces, less than the 10-ounce Kindle.

Samsung is still working on versions of an e-book reader to sell in other countries and executives said they aim to show prototypes at an industry trade show in January . . .  Samsung's initial e-book reader doesn't support wireless downloads or connections to the Internet, as Amazon's Kindle and readers by some smaller firms do. Instead, a customer must download a book to a PC and then into the device.

There are other hardware OEMs also looking at building e-readers. The emerging critical mass of hardware devices means that publishers and booksellers will take the market seriously, which is indeed happening.

The right form factor and user experience are still very much in development. I believe that the winning devices in this segment will offer ebooks, magazines and newspapers but also be Internet capabile and have color screens. They will also need to retail for less than $300. 

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Related: See this video demo of the new Samsung Mondi (WinMo) "WiMax Tablet"