The future of e-readers

Earlier this year we presented two sessions on e-readers. I came away wondering if dedicated e-readers such as the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader were about to be marginalised by the slew of tablet computers coming to market.

Although the true believers know that in most cases reading on a Kindle or a Sony Reader is more satisfying than reading on say an iPad, many of us would be willing to forego the Kindle in favour of the iPad or other tablet because the tablet is more versatile and it has a colour screen.

The popularity of the iPad as an e-reader has not escaped e-book publishers and providers. 40,000 classic titles from the collections of the are about to be made available for the iPad by the British Library, reports the BBC.
These will not be plain text but will be be digital copies of the original works, complete with illustrations and page numbers.
And this is just the start. The Library has a deal with Google to digitise 250,000 titles.

So will deals like this help to kill the dedicated e-reader? Well no. At least not yet because the sale of dedicated e-readers continues to climb. And a major hurdle, the lack of colour, may soon be resolved. Fujitsu just demonstrated what looks like a very advanced – but usable – prototype of an color e-Paper based e-Reader.