The Bookseller.com

6th September 2008

Neill Denny is editor-in-chief of The Bookseller. He will be blogging on the book business and on how the print magazine is produced each week.

The ebook has landed

23.07.08

The decision by Waterstone's to stock Sony's ebook reader, available in more than 200 stores from September, is a bold one. No regional testing or soft launch: bang, straight in with a full-scale national launch backed by one of the strongest blue-chip brands in the world.

Borders, of course, has been selling the rival Iliad since the weekend before the BA conference in May. But at a price of £400, with a weaker manufacturer brand and only in a handful of stores, the Borders launch has been a toe in the water compared to Waterstone's headlong plunge off a diving board.

But the competitor Waterstone's really cares about is Amazon. Its Kindle is already on sale in the US, and it is only a matter of time, perhaps a few short months, before it comes here. It differs from the Sony product in two key ways: it is wi-fi enabled, meaning readers can buy and download books direct from the internet remotely, and it is proprietary, ie readers can only buy books from Amazon. The first property is clearly a strength against the dumb terminal-locked qualities of the e-reader, which has to be plugged in to a PC to download books, and given Amazon's vast range the second is not necessarily a weakness.

The fear for Waterstone's and Borders is that a successful Kindle would suck the oxygen right out of the market, and they would be effectively left trying to sell MP3 players against an iPod.

But that battle is still to come and in the immediate future the Sony product will stand or fall on its own merits. At £200 it's expensive for a book, but cheap for a sexy, top-end bit of electronic kit. There seems to be no shortage of kit-obsessed early-adopters ready to lash out on electronic toys in other markets, but whether enough of them are Waterstone's customers or heavy book buyers is an open question.

At a functional level the Sony is easy to read, smaller than a hardback and comparatively light  - 260g - to carry around.  Battery life is decent, enough to read War & Peace five times apparently, while it can store up to 160 books. Thousands more are available from Waterstone's site  - or those of publishers -  but Waterstone's is confident it will be the readers' portal of choice.

Electronic reading devices are here to stay. They will get better and add in phones, music and cameras in time. The challenge for publishers and retailers is to make a decent margin on the devices and on the books.

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