ePaper

As everyone was jumping on the Kindle bandwagon in 2006 I remained skeptical, preferring my laptop and mobile phone screens to the kindle format. I appreciated the low power consumption and amazing contrast of ePaper but I preferred paper books and still read hard and softback books at home. I rarely read from my phone; instead I listen to audio books on it.

But the week we left for our trip here to Switzerland we were planning what to do with Eitana (my 7-year-old) who is in that “reading rat” phase of devouring 2-3 books per day. We could not possibly pack enough books for six weeks. She hates reading German and cannot read Hebrew books. Last year I had gotten Elisheva a Nook to prevent further back injuries from carrying the huge text books around. It works perfectly for her; she even presented her paper at the conference last week reading from it!

I decided to try to get another older Nook – the slow, small, black-and-white ePaper kind. I found a neighbor on craigslist and she stopped by on her way to work. I gave her $75. Then I loaded it with PDF’s of the books my wife and Eitana are reading and let the experiment play out. A few days later I received a gushing email message titled “I love my Nook!” about how convenient it is, how long the battery lasts, how you can read ePaper for hours without getting a headache as LCD screens sometimes cause, how everything fits on it; it has Sodoku, etc.

Then Eitana started using it Thursday at the High School Graduation. She read for 90 minutes straight. I started to look for a third nook. Then my wife decided to get one for her father. So I was looking to get two more Nooks (in addition to the two we have) three days before our departure. I did not have time to pick them up and regret it very much. On the plane there was some contention and even I started using the Nook. It is a great form factor. I want one! When we changed planes in SFO we downloaded ten more books from the library.

So now I am looking for three more Nooks.

death of the paper publishing industry

In Japan, the most literate nation in the world with more books read per capita than any other country, the paper publishing industry has been eclipsed by Sony eReaders that pre-date the Kindle and Nook by at least three years. There have been large upheavals in the paper supply chains and livelihoods of the people working in the industry. In terms of numbers and the world’s resources, China, is of course, most important. The literacy rate in China is quite good (Go, Deng Chow Peng!) and many people read for pleasure, for news, for leisure, and even for business. At the conference where Elisheva delivered her awesome paper about the odd non-Assimilation of the Song dynasty, a paper about the future of the paper industry in China as a result of ePublishing caught the buzz. The paper publishing industry in Europe is also very big but not threatened as quickly. eReaders are not catching on as fast here. Sony is making some headway but the stores and libraries are not pushing them as hard. India has a low literacy and low per-capita disposable income; their infrastructure is also relatively poor. So despite the huge population, ePublishing is not as big a disruption as others. And we all know of the trend in the USA – Nook and Kindle are the best selling items in their respective stores. More libraries and publishers are hopping on to the formats. There are amazing Nook-only RSS feeds (Steven King!) and you can get the “New Yorker” on your Kindle (Malcolm Gladwell!!) But the real kicker as far as I am concerned is travel and the form factor. I still like paper a lot but ePaper is just as good.