We knew we could feel the winds of change coming, but I don’t know if anybody was really prepared for the sheer deluge of new e-Readers that are poised to flood the market in 2010. We’ve already touched on the rumored Apple iSlate, and Heart’s Skiff caught our attention just the other day. With the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas kicking into gear Thursday, I suppose it was inevitable that we’d be up to our necks in e-Readers. Here’s a quick rundown of the newest entrants so far.

Samsung’s E6 and E101
Price: $399 and $699 respectively
Release Date: Early 2010
Key features: The names of the readers refer to their size. The E6 is a 6-inch display, the same size as the Kindle 2, where the 101 is, predictable, 10.1 inches, and more closely aligns to the Kindle DX’s form factor. Probably the biggest differentiator is the EMR stylus pen that lets you annotate by hand-writing on the screen itself.
Our take: The stylus is a neat feature, but I’ve never had much of a problem typing notes on the Kindle’s QWERTY keyboard. Unless Samsung comes up with some differentiating capabilities, these things are dead in the water at their price point.

Plastic Logic’s Que proReader
Price: $649 for the 4GB version, $799 for the 8GB with 3G
Release Date: April 2010
Key features: The 8.5-by-11 inch flexible touchscreen is its biggest sell, allowing users to drop and bend the device without fear of breaking it. It also supports Powerpoint and Excel documents natively. As we’ve discussed before, it will draw its content from B&N’s robust content library.
Our take: Plastic Logic plans to market the Que towards professionals, which is good, because I don’t know that most people are going to look kindle on a device that does much the same as the Kindle DX for twice the price. Having said that, the technology they used to develop a light-weight touchscreen is intriguing, if it’s not soon trumped by another company who can do it in full color too.

Amazon’s Kindle DX International
Price: $489
Release Date: January 19
Key features: It’s the Kindle DX we all know and love, but now it features International 3G coverage by AT&T. This also means that would-be Kindle DX owners living abroad should finally be able to get their hands on one.
Our take: Obviously, this can hardly be considered a new entrant into the e-Reader market all by its lonesome, but Amazon’s continued push to make International 3G a de facto feature is a promising one. If you were thinking of getting a Kindle DX, just wait a few more weeks and you can get the fancy new version that will let you buy books on vacation in a foreign land.

In anticipation of the Consumer Electronics Show, which runs from January 7-10, the magazine publisher Hearst has taken the wraps of their own new entrant into the e-Reader club. Called the Skiff, it has a similar form factor to Amazon’s Kindle DX, presumably to offer the most possible screen room to display Heart’s content as it might appear in an actual magazine. And of course sports the now-obligatory e-Ink technology for ease of viewing.

Hearst also announced that they’re teaming up with Sprint to offer wireless 3G connectivity for the Skiff, and Sprint revealed plans to sell the Skiff on Sprint.com and in their many Sprint retail outlets. Particularly astute Kindle aficionados might recall that Amazon severed their ties with Sprint back in October, due in large part to concerns about their ability to handle 3G coverage abroad. The newer Kindle International, now the de-facto Kindle 2 SKU, runs on AT&T’s more robust wireless network. This appears like Sprint’s way of getting back in the e-Reader game.

A big question mark for the Skiff right now is whether they’ll be able to infuse the device with enough content partnerships to get people to even give it a second glance. Hearst is leading a consortium of publishers that includes the likes of Time Warner, Conde Nast, News Corp., and Meredith, all of whom are likely to offer their magazine content for the device. Evidently, they’d like to branch out into newspapers, comic books, and blogs as well, but it doesn’t appear like books are on the table.

Just about the only thing about the Skiff that really strikes me as intriguing is the partnership they’ve inked with Nielsen and comScore to handle advertising analytics for the device. Presumably, they’ll be able to tailor the advertising in the digital version of a magazine to suit a user’s particular reading habits. Do you read a lot of articles about travel? Expect to see a bunch of ads for Expedia and Travelocity. This is an area that Amazon and B&N haven’t even begun to broach yet, so it’ll be interesting to see how they handle it.

I really don’t think the device stands a chance. Unless they leverage the advertising revenue to offer the Skiff at a deep discount at retail, there’s no way people are going to spend the cash on a device with such a limited range of content. And while advertising models are interesting to geeks like me, there’s almost nothing about the Skiff to set it apart from the other also-ran entrants getting into the e-Reader market this year.

What is important is whether Amazon begins to consider such an advertising strategy as well. Speaking personally, I always thought of my Kindle as a calm peaceful place in a world insistent on cramming advertising into every nook and cranny of our everyday lives. Here’s hoping we don’t lose that.

Fans of the music industry remember the transition to digital downloads as a trying time. Music companies accustomed to charging as much as $20 for a new CD were reeling with the mainstream adoption of file sharing technology. It took as much as a decade before they really figured out embraced the fact that there were ways to make money in this new marketplace, despite the fact that things were scary and different.

And while the rest of the media world, from movies to television to video games continues on the speedy path to unfettered digitization of content, the publishing industry is mired in the past. Just last week, publishers Simon & Schuster and the Harper Hatchette Book Group announced their plans to institute an across-the-board delay on the digital release of their newest books this spring.

According to a representative from the HarperCollins, their reasons for doing this are purely financial. Because Amazon has pinned the price of eBooks in their store at $9.99, consumers are opting to purchase those over the more expensive hardcover editions of new releases. The result has been a hit to book publishers’ bottom line; one they are wont to accept without a fight.

Hatchette CEO David Young, interviewed in the Wall Street Journal last week, explained: “We’re doing this to preserve our industry. I can’t sit back and watch years of building authors sold off at bargain-basement prices. It’s about the future of the business.”

The industry is moving towards eBooks. This is a fact. Amazon currently has over 360,000 books in their existing library, and the number grows every day. Google just recently announced that their plans to sell books through their new venture Google Editions will extend to all e-Readers, including the Amazon Kindle. With market leaders like those two companies throwing their bulk behind the idea, how can anybody deny that it’s anything other than inevitable?

The parallels to the music industry cannot be overstated. When they refused to embrace digital downloads, they effectively conditioned a generation of consumers to turn to piracy before considering buying downloaded music. Now digital downloads are considered a loss-leader for the music business – a non-profitable teaser used principally to get people to attend live concerts.

By delaying the release of best-selling titles, book publishers are stoking the flames of a potential piracy problem. Do they really think that people are just going to go back to buying hardcover editions of books after dropping the $259 for an e-Reader? Either people are going to bide their time on cheaper fare or they’re going to use their music downloading skills to find that latest bestseller. Publishers can either get their acts together or watch as their industry crumbles around them. Your choice, boys!

Outside of the tactile feel and smell of books, one of the biggest mental barriers people have against picking up an e-Reader for the first time is the assumption that one’s brain simply doesn’t retain information attained via a screen as well as it does via the page. If you’re on the fence about getting an e-Reader yourself, or this issue comes up often when you try and sell your family and friends on the Kindle, there may finally be some science to back you up.

The first thing one has to understand is that reading is not a natural process for the human brain. Instead, it’s a technology that we’ve cobbled together because of our natural ability in the area of language, as well as our god-given visual acuity. While many skeptics of e-Reader technology insist that reading the printed page is as natural as breathing air, the fact of the matter is that humans have only really been reading in great numbers for the last 500 some-odd years since the printing press went into mainstream use. Whether consciously or not, we developed the technology to fit around the way our brains process information.

A French neurological study on the subject of the human brain and reading found that humans read best when the ventral visual system (the part of the brain responsible for building a representation of the world outside of the body), is stimulated by words displayed in a familiar format. If words are represented in an unfamiliar way, a different, slower pathway in the brain is activated that focuses on processing the information from each letter individually.

So what does that mean? It’s possible that, for certain people, the experience of reading on a computer screen is unfamiliar in the same way that seeing letters jumbled or rotated is unfamiliar. They’re forced to use that secondary ventral pathway to process the information they take in, which means that it not only takes longer for them to understand what they’re reading, but it can be more mentally taxing as well. Combine that with the very human predilection to be distracted by all the temptations of the Internet, and I think it’s easy to see why some people observe that their digital reading experiences aren’t quite up to the standard held by books.

That’s the rub. The very design of the e-Reader, the very intention of the e-Ink technology, is to replicate that paper experience as crisply as possible. There aren’t yet studies to support it, but for many people who grew up with the printed page, the clarity of e-Ink is enough to stimulate that primary ventral visual system, making reading as smooth as possible. And indeed, for younger folks already accustomed to reading on a screen, the e-Ink might not be necessary at all.

In my opinion, the biggest enemy of the eBook moving forward is companies like Apple, who are reportedly quite interested in getting into the e-Reader market. While I don’t doubt their ability to produce a quality product, Apple’s habit of trying to make do-it-all gadgets has me concerned that their version of an e-Reader is going to focus on all the bells and whistles instead of the literary experience. I fear that while I’m trying to read about how awesome Andrew Jackson was, it’ll be death by a million distractions, from Twitter updates, to instant messaging, to, heaven forbid, phone calls from Mom.

As long as e-Readers succeed at keeping the background noise to a minimum, there’s no reason eBooks can be just as immersive as the printed page. We’re likely never going to do away with books, for a variety of reasons, but it’s not because eBooks don’t work. It’s just a matter of whether we have the wherewithal to just sit down and pay attention.

The consumer gadget world has been abuzz for weeks about a series of press invitations sent out by the book giant Barnes & Noble. The invites were purposely vague, it would seem, simply referring to “a major event in the company’s history” to take place in New York City on October 20th.

While B&N seemed to at least make a half-hearted effort at keeping the subject of the event secret, the Wall Street Journal stole a bit of their thunder, publishing a story last Friday outlining their plan to release an e-Reader to compete with Amazon’s Kindle.

According to their report, which was confirmed Wednesday with photographs obtained by gadget blog Gizmodo, the new as-yet-unnamed device will feature a black and white 6-inch e-Ink display (the same size as the Kindle 2) as well as a small touch-screen color LCD display on the bottom which will serve to both show book covers in greater and richer detail than an e-Ink screen is capable of, but also allowing for a more intuitive touch-based navigation system and a virtual keyboard for typing.

For years, device-makers have struggled with the limitations of e-Ink technology. The dream has always been to allow for the color, richness, and touch-navigation of an LCD with the readability and power-savings of e-Ink. The Kindle opts to use e-Ink for everything, and its slow refresh rate makes for a second-rate content navigation system. Sony’s e-Readers utilize the touch-screen interface, but their device isn’t quite as readable thanks to the extra layers of material. B&N’s new reader would appear to circumvent these limitations by relegating the two technologies to their own separate screens.

While theirs is a clever solution to the puzzle of mixing the two technologies, the degree of convergence is probably not as thorough as most gadget geeks, a brotherhood of which I am a member, would like. Until they can truly blend the two technologies on one screen, they’ve only solved half the puzzle. But hey, it does look like the device has an easy-to-use book light for reading in dark places. There’s real innovation.

While these leaks have kind of taken away much of the surprise of the October 20th event, there are still a lot of questions left unanswered. With the hardware presenting only an incremental upgrade over the competition, the shape of Barnes and Nobles’ content delivery service may well determine their success. We’ll have to see whether the rumored Google Books accessibility will come to fruition, and the built-in social networking features hinted at by Gizmodo, which include the ability to lend books and utilize connectivity with Twitter and Facebook, could become the device’s biggest selling point.

However the event does shake down, I’m excited to see another legitimate contender on the market. In the mean time, we’ll be keeping our ears to the pavement for the latest rumors and developments.

Barnes & Noble eBooks

There’s no denying the fact that when you first hold a Kindle, it feels as though you’ve got the future of mass market literature in your hands. That sense of being on the forefront of a new wave of technology is one of those intangible joys of being an early adopter.

According to a new report launched by Forrester Research, an independent research company, that sense of being among the few to enjoy the technology might not last much longer. The 2009 holiday season is forecasted to be the breakout year for e-Readers, which have so far outstripped their projected sales figures for this year by 50%. That’s actually small peanuts, because by the end of 2010, they project cumulative sales in the US to more than double to 10 million.

Among the many factors contributing to the future success of this market niche, the availability of a number of different e-Readers from well-known consumer electronics manufacturers, most of which we’ve profiled, is the principle one. Forrester Research predicts that the expansion of the market will be driven by a new generation of tablets that sport features like flexible displays, bigger screen sizes, color, and video.

They’re also predicting that brick and mortar retailers are finally going to devise a way to properly sell e-Readers in their stores. Barnes & Noble will be at the forefront of this push, utilizing their ubiquitous retail presence and established relationship with book publishers to elbow their way into the market. Best Buy is another big player, as they’re in the processing of putting in “Gadget and eReader” sections in all of their stores and properly training their once-clueless staff about the technology.

Watching this whole process as an avid reader of eBooks should be interesting. Speaking personally, I think some of the newcomers to the marketplace are sabotaging their efforts before they start. Including new wrinkles like touch screens and the ability to play video are nice features, but they give the impression that one is buying a large handheld iPhone instead of a dedicated e-Reader.

Any new entrant that doesn’t feature e-ink for ease of viewing and wireless access to a robustly-stocked store of material is operating at an immediate disadvantage. Sexy new features will help them appeal to the mainstream, but the bread and butter of the e-Reader market is actually in selling books, and if a new device can’t do that well, no amount of flash is going to endear it to consumers.

Whatever your e-Reader of choice, it’s clear that the best times for eBooks are still in front of us. As fun as it is to get in early on an endearing new form of media, mainstream success this holiday season will bring more publishers to the table, drive prices down below their already reasonable levels, and introduce a greater variety of material for our viewing pleasure. It’s a good time to be an e-Reader enthusiast!

The last week or so has been filled with a flurry of announcements and news about all the various new contenders for the e-reader market. The Amazon Kindle was the first to really set the ebook market into motion, but it will soon have lots of competition to deal with. Currently, there are four serious players: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Sony, and Samsung.

I’m really excited to see so many other companies jump into the fray. Amazon has had a good run, but has been plagued with complaints of “premium pricing.” I agree that Amazon could probably back down on the price of their Kindle products, but they’ve had no reason to. Before long, competition from rivaling companies will likely bring the price down to a level more comfortable for average consumers.

Since there’s so much information about the Kindle on this site, I’m going to jump straight to the others.

Barnes and Noble eBook Reader

I’m most excited about the reader Barnes & Noble is rumored to release late this year or early next year. As an establish brick and mortar book seller, B&N should have plenty of experience working with publishers. Also, Barnes and Noble is touting an impressive 700,000 titles for their e-Reader.

To make up for the lack of technical experience, they’re bringing in Plastic Logic to develop a very promising e-Reader. The specs I’ve read include a large 8.5 x 11 screen, a thin 1/4 inch construction, touchscreen, and both wired and wireless connectivity.

If Barnes and Noble plays the game right, they should be able to give Amazon some solid competition. You can be sure I’ll post more here as information becomes available.

Apple Tablet e-Reader

The next heavy hitter in line is Apple. Given their experience with creating popular gadgets and that little thing called iTunes, I would put Apple at the top of the list… if I new what angle they were playing.

There’s talk that Apple may simply be interested in getting in on the hardware side of things and leaving Amazon and B&N to fight over eBook sales. Considering the fact that Amazon offers a “kindle reader” for the iPhone makes this a real possibility. However, if Apple doesn’t want to play nice and takes the iTunes route for eBook sales, I believe they will be very difficult to overcome.

The Sony e-Reader

Even though Sony was the first to market a true e-Reader, they’ve been playing catch-up ever since Amazon released the Kindle. Recently, though, they’ve been in the spotlight in regards to their digital library. With contributions from Google’s public domain library, Sony now claims to have one million eBooks available.

I wouldn’t count Sony out of the race just yet, but they’ve yet to bounce back from the heavy blow Amazon delivered a few years ago. Maybe their recent increase in available eBooks will get them back into the fight.

Samsung e-Reader

Lastly, there’s Samsung’s entry into the e-Reader market. Samsung recently released their first e-Reader in South Korea with luke-warm reviews. The specs I’ve read include a 5-inch screen, only 512MB of memory (compared the 4GB in the Kindle DX), and currently provides a library of only 2,500 books with more to be added in the coming months.

Samsung is a huge manufacturer and shouldn’t be discounted for their seemingly failed first attempt. They may get things right on the next release (assuming there is one). e-Reader enthusiasts should probably skip the current offerings and keep their eyes open for the next generation.