Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"The e-book business will grow faster than people think. Innovations from Amazon and Apple have increased the velocity at which we consume e-books, but there are two emergent behaviors that will increase the rate of overall consumption."

Trey Ratcliff's personal experiences in both the traditional publishing method and the new e-book method is a good insight into how the e-book business will see fast growth and rapidly overtake the traditional method where publishing house rules. Trey starts with what it takes to get a book published and sold when a traditional publishing house is involved. He then examines the profitability of both methods and describes the emerging trends that he believes will cause writers to favor e-publishing.

"In the Pixel Qi display's current form, it's impressive, though nowhere near perfect. In its backlit LCD mode, it's just about as good as any other 10.1-inch, 1024x600 netbook display, except that the viewing angle seems more limited, before the color started warping."

One of the advantages that e-books like the Kindle have had over a notebook or netbook is how well they work in most lighting conditions, especially daylight. However, e-ink has suffered among other issues, slow refresh times. Pixel Qi appears to be changing that with their own colour display that offers much faster display times. Based on Gizmodo's post, even video seems manageable. Without a detailed analysis, old school LCD displays for performance notebooks is safe, but considering the current limitations of netbooks, it looks like Pixel Qi has a fairly broad market that would welcome an all lighting condition display.

"If I had any doubts that the e-book wars are officially on, my first day at CES dispelled them thoroughly. Note that I said "e-book wars," and not "e-reader wars." That's because there's a tidal wave of E-Ink-based e-readers that are about to hit the US, so that by the second half of this year (at the latest) E-Ink screens will be a dime a dozen."

If I had a nickel for every e-book that is coming out I would be a rich man. It was only a matter of time before e-books become a commodity like your typical computer once Amazon showed that there was a market for them. Though they are definitely improving, I see several challenges. First, as mentioned in ArsTechnica, is the battle for a central site to buy book. Either publishers will have to accept some widespread format so that anyone can sell books, or eventually, there will be just a select few sites to dominate e-book distribution. Second, depending on the price of the e-books, they may face some challenges of longer life netbooks and their variants. With netbooks getting longer and longer battery life, the only advantage that e-books will have left will be a good display, which might not be enough. Only time will tell.