The other makers of digital readers are treading cautiously. Jinke, a Chinese company, plans to sell into the education field in China and other markets. But it declined to comment in detail on its plans. IRex Technologies, a spin-off from Royal Philips Electronics, says it will make a device available for sale by April. CEO Willem Endhoven says the company will begin by selling to companies, such as newspaper or textbook publishers, rather than directly to consumers.
There are sure to be other companies that introduce readers in the months and years ahead. Plastic Logic Inc., a British startup, is working on a flexible display the size of an 8 1/2-in.-by-11-in. Piece of paper that can receive books, news, or e-mail wirelessly. It’s partnering with Japan’s NTT DoCoMo and plans to have a product on the market by early 2008.
There’s even speculation that Apple could come out with its own device, an iPod designed for books. The secretive company hasn’t said anything publicly and declined to comment for this article.
Just as digital readers are hitting the market, the number of books on the Net is swelling to Library of Congress proportions. Google, through an initiative it began a year ago, is scanning millions of books from five of the world’s largest libraries and plans to make the contents searchable online. The effort has drawn the ire(愤怒)of publishers and authors, since it’s digitizing some books still under copyright. Publishers sued(控告)last fall for copyright infringement and the case is pending.
New Literary Models?
Yet Google is helping ignite the digital market. In November, following the lawsuit, Random House announced plans to digitize 25,000 titles. It will sell access to them to consumers, charging a per page rate for everything from novels to recipes out of a cookbook. In December, Harper Collins Publishers Inc. said it would build a digital warehouse of its entire holdings—another 25,000 titles or so—which it may later sell over the Net.
Amazon.com is moving aggressively into digital books, too. It sells digital versions of most of its titles, available for download instantly. In August, it launched Amazon Shorts, a collection of stories, novellas, and essays that can be downloaded for 49 cents a piece. Later this year it plans to offer shoppers who purchase traditional books the chance to buy a version they can read on the Web, too. That way they could keep Stephen King’s Cell: a novel on their nightstand and read a chapter from any computer with Net access. “We think consumers increasingly are ready for it,” says Steve Kessel, vice president for worldwide digital media.
Authors are intrigued by the opportunities to go digital. George Saunders, a short story author and professor of English at Syracuse University, says he’d like a way to get his work out to readers more quickly. After the scandal broke over James Frey’s falsehoods in his hit book A Million Little Pieces, Saunders penned a humorous essay stemming from the events. It was a confession to Oprah Winfrey that all of the fiction he’d written had, in fact, been true. But Saunders had a hard time getting the piece published quickly, and now it feels dated. “There might be a different model for a literary community that’s quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity,” he says. If digital books finally do take off, they could change not only how we read, but what we read, too.
1. The author thinks that the success of digital books can’t last for a long time.
2. Reading books with “digital ink”, the reader uses no power when he changes the page.
3. The iPod of Apple Company has demonstrated that people are willing to accept digital books.
4. A Chinese company also plans to sell its digital reader which can download books directly from Internet.
5.The first major player to take advantage of the “digital ink” technology is .
6. The users of “ Sony Reader” will have to search the Web on their own to get .
7.Plastic logic company is working on a flexible display that can receive books, news, or .
8.Someone thinks that will design its own device, an iPod, designed for books.
9.If a reader wants to download a piece of short story from Amazon, he should pay .
10.The prosperity of digital books could change not only the way of reading but also .
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