Amazon and Apple fight it out over the E-Book
Digital books or as they are known now as E-books
, representing electronic books, are becoming more and more popular. Why? Mostly due to the convenience of having a book at your disposal instantly, rather than the old fashioned way of having to make the effort of going somewhere to purchase the book before reading.
E-books are created in e-text, which forms the digital media equivalent of a conventional printed book. The rights are sometimes restricted with a digital rights management system. E-books also can only be read on dedicated hardware devices known as e-readers. Some computers or cell phones can also be used to read e-books.
Believe it or not, the earliest e-book dates back to 1971 during the Gutenberg Project. Michael Hart was working on a desktop prototype for a proposed notebook computer called the Dynabook.
This was followed by a select number of E-books designed typically for small groups and on a small range of topics. These included manuals on hardware or technology. But with the Internet in the 1990s came the transferring of files and the increase in E-book popularity.
In the 90s, E-book formats were originally supported by major software companies such as Adobe, which allowed E-books to be transferred through PDF formatting. Independent and open-source programmers soon followed.
Then came 2009 whereupon new marketing models for E-books were being developed and dedicated reading hardware was produced. In the United States, Amazon released the Kindle. Sony also had a reader called the PRS-500. Apple, wanting a piece of the pie, launched its own device on January 27, 2010 called the iPad. While the iPad was not dedicated to being just a reader as the Kindle was, Apple did boast that it would be the next most popular E-book device and that they had already had agreements with five of the six largest publishers to allow Apple to distribute their e-books.
Amazon in the meantime was pushing to put its Kindle Reader app on every platform, from the iPad to the Mac, PCs and mobile devices. Today it has become a rush to see who will make their platform the E-book go-to standard.
While Amazon has dominated the printed book selling world, the E-book world is still pretty wide open. Ebookstores are springing up everywhere. The market continues to grow to meet the need and even with the field being wide open, Apple states that 5 million books were being downloaded during the first 65 days of sales of the iPad from the iBookStore.
With the iPad comes the huge interest in "enhanced" E-books. Such books may be iPad's leg up on Kindle. Textbooks, magazines, trade manuals, video instruction and tactile-feedback applications are all looking to exploit the iPad. They are using the iBookstore for distribution, but also the App store, where a lot of hybrid book products are already on sale.
Is there any difference in book prices with Amazon and iBookstore? Not really. Book pricing averages at about $14.99.
The iPad just looks nicer. For instance, the books you own will be displayed on a bookshelf and the pages inside the books themselves are displayed on an off-white background. Page turns are handled by tapping on the right or left side of the screen.
If that isn't enough to push Apple to the top, the iPad will also support the popular ePub format and authors will be able to embed multimedia such as photos, videos, and audio files directly into books. The electronic bookstore will now also be a standard app for the upcoming new version of iPhone.
Although Amazon had the lead in the E-book world, whether they will hold it or not will soon to be seen.
Amazon and Apple fight it out over the E-Book
By: Chad Figueiredo
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