Everything Else Going Digital, Why Not Bestseller List?

While the digital revolution has redefined such terms as "book", "author", and "publisher", the bestseller list has remained more or less immutable. It's still pretty much the Sunday New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and a few other well respected gatekeepers like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

There are countless imitators and emulators but until last year they were all based on the same fundamental principle, the velocity with which print books flow through checkout counters. They offer a snapshot of what the public is reading. But - given the growing popularity of e-books, are the old BS lists beginning to sound like...well, BS?

The e-book camel got its nose under the bestseller tent last July when USA Today announced it would include Kindle sales in its metrics. This week the newspaper added the Barnes & Noble Nook and Sony's Reader™. According to the paper's press release, USA Today's "list ranks titles regardless of genre or format, providing one of the best assessments of which books are most popular among readers and consumers each week." USA Today boasts a daily print circulation of almost 2 million. It's website, usatoday.com, claims to reach over 6 million daily.

How much will the addition of e-books impact on the bestseller lists of t0morrow? It will be interesting to find out. With Google, Amazon, Sony and B&N claiming e-warehouses of between 500,000 and 1 million books, the influx of titles into the list may skew the rankings like an elephant sitting on a see-saw.

Here's the press release: USA TODAY'S Best-Selling Books List Continues to Add Digital Sales Information

Richard Curtis

Google Editions Will Unchain Content from DRM

Sometime in the first half of this year Google will open the doors to its bookstore, called Google Editions. Ian Paul, in PC World, writes: "Unlike Google's biggest competitors, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, which rely heavily on restrictive DRM, Google's store will not be device-specific - allowing for e-books purchased through Google Editions to be read on the far greater number of e-book readers that will flood the market in 2010"

That spells good news for the makers of all those new e-reading gadgets that may be well engineered and loaded with fun features but are hard-up for content. Amazon has its Kindle, but because its system is closed (that's what DRM means) you can't easily get Kindle content on a non-Kindle device. Same goes for B&N and its Nook.

Now you'll be able to download Google's vast (half a million at launch) library on just about any device available. Since most publishers have not given their content exclusively to Amazon or B&N, you'll be able to find and buy it from Google editions and read it on your Que, Skiff, Cool-Er, Flepia, or any other device. Just try not to be embarrassed when someone asks you the name of that e-book reader you're holding in your hand.

The deal Google offers publishers is 63 % of gross sales. This compares favorable with the 50% offered by most e-retailers. But Google is also offering to partner with retailers. If you decide you'd like to open an e-book retail store but don't know how and where to acquire the content, Google will furnish it. Your company would get 55 percent of revenues less a commission for Google.

"Google's e-books would reportedly be indexed and searchable like many books are now through Google's Book Search," says Paul. "Unlike titles offered through e-readers, Google Editions books would not have to be accessed through a dedicated reader or special application.Instead, any device with a Web browser will be able to access a Google Editions book. After you purchase and access your online book for the first time, it will be cached in your browser making the book available when you're offline."

Details in Google Editions Embraces Universal E-book Format

Richard Curtis

Apres Kindle Le Deluge. A Guide for the Perplexed

Scorecard here! Can't tell yer e-book readers without a scorecard!

That seems to be the consensus of bloggers covering the recent Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas. Inspired by the success of the Kindle, Sony eReader, and Nook, a host of would-be Kindle-killers and Nookslayers has flooded the marketplace with lookalikes, playalikes and costalikes. Consumers who've been sitting on the sidelines waiting for a second generation of e-readers are now shaking their heads in confusion. Huffington Post has produced a handy-dandy guide for the perplexed with photos and thumbnail descriptions of each device. Just click here, then go the red navigation bar and click "Next" to view a complete array of current e-book reader choices. It may answer your questions. Or it may leave you as mixed up as ever.

So...with so many gadgets to choose among and factors to compare, is there a simple single decisive criterion to guide us home? In fact there is: Content. All things being more or less equal, you can't go too wrong selecting a reader with a rich library or store of books, magazines, newspapers and other publications.

A case in point is a device displayed at the Consumer Electronic Show called the Skiff Reader. Dan Nosowitz, Gizmodo's reviewer, gave it high marks for beauty, slimness, weight, screen size and functionality: "I just got a chance to play with the big-screened, touchscreened Skiff Reader, which is targeted at periodicals. It's incredibly thin, incredibly light, and they've even got a color screen prototype—Kindle and Nook should be scared."

They should be scared but they won't be for one simple reason: Skiff does not have a store or library of content behind it. "Kindle and Nook waltzed into this world with massive and well-known stores behind them," says Gizmodo, "and the Skiff is creating one from scratch. They've got a lot of publishers behind them, but the store right now is pretty bare. Of course, since it's not out yet, this may all be a moot point—but I wonder if their scrappy little store can compete with Amazon and Barnes & Noble."

Wilson Rothman, blogging for Gawker, states the case for content even more bluntly in a posting titled There Are Officially Too Many E-Book Readers. A lot of consumers, he writes, "will buy some $100 reader, then wonder why they can't borrow books from their friend who has a Nook, or can't get the same stuff that's sold on the Kindle."

Rothman also raises a very important point: if the new breed of cheap e-book readers doesn't carry legitimate content, customers might turn to file-sharing pirates for it. "Cheap e-ink readers will essentially be targeted at people with libraries of pirated books," he says.

What's a consumer to do? Rothman seems to be urging us to wait a little longer until full color, multitouch tablets reach the marketplace. "E-ink is an interim technology, a stopgap measure to keep our attention till we have full-color video tablets (slates?) whose batteries last for 'days'."

Rothman's bottom line? "Go Kindle, wait for a cheap-as-hell reader, pray for a slate, or buy a book. A real paper-and-ink book."

Richard Curtis

Nooks Up, Books Down for Holidays at B&N

An official Barnes & Noble, Inc. press release reports that the bookseller suffered its second holiday season decline in a row, with sales - $1.1 billion - down 5% over 2008 for the the period from November 1 2009 through January 2 2010. Michael Cader of Publisher's Lunch reminds us that the firm's holiday sales a year ago were off 7% over 2007, so the compounded declines were sufficient cause for concern to trigger a reduction in earnings projections.

That's the bad news. The good is that BN.Com saw a 17% jump in sales from $114 million to $134 million. The hike was probably due to Nook sales which analysts place at at $10-20 million.

“We’re pleased we were able to ship all holiday orders for nook in time,” said Steve Riggio, CEO of Barnes & Noble. “Orders for nook remained strong throughout the holiday season, and, in fact, accelerated after we announced that we had sold out our initial supply. Demand remains strong in the New Year and greater than our supply, however, we expect production to catch-up with demand and be fully stocked in our stores in the next few months."

Pictured here is our kind of book nook.

RC

You Know E-Books Have Made It When Anna Wintour Features One in Vogue

The "Last Look" feature on the last page of Vogue is usually reserved for the most chic and preposterously priced items like $20,000 handbags, megastylish shoes and ragingly expensive bling. The last item you'd expect to see on that page is an e-book. But there, on the "Last Look" page of Vogue's January 2010 issue, opened to Chapter 2 of Pride and Prejudice, is Barnes & Noble's entry into the e-book sweepstakes, The Nook, advertised for a modest $259.00.

It shares the page with a deliciously buttery-looking calfskin case called the "Electronic Porta Libro," manufactured by Tod's, in which you can, um, show your Nook off at the Venice Biennale or the casino at Monte Carlo. At $525.00 it's a little closer to the opulence and elegance one expects on that page of the magazine. If that's too rich for your blood you can pick up a leather Kindle jacket with one of three New Yorker cover images from Conde Nast for $49.99.

RC

New Yorkeroid Kindle Caddies

We know there's an aerosol to make your Nook smell like a new book, a musty old one, or crunchy bacon. Now there's a way to make your Kindle look like a copy of the New Yorker.

Today we were solicited by Conde Nast Publications, publisher of the New Yorker, inviting us to take advantage of a 20%-off offer to buy a jacket for our Kindle utilizing iconic cover art from the grand old magazine. The publisher is co-opping with the manufacturer of the covers, M-Edge.

M-Edge's Kindle caddies solve a vexing problem we wrote about not long ago:

As the E-Book Era unfolds, you will never again be able to form an instant impression of a stranger from the book he or she is reading, or send a signal of your own. Why? Because, in Kaufman's words, "for the purpose of sizing up a stranger from afar, perhaps the biggest problem with Kindle or its kin is the camouflage factor: when no one can tell what you’re reading, how can you make it clear that you’re poring over the new Lincoln biography as opposed to, say, 'He’s Just Not That Into You'?" Kaufman describes the Kindle as "the technology equivalent of a plain brown wrapper."

RC

Times's Pogue Rips BN a New One Over Nook, Calling it "A Mess."

Saying Barnes & Noble clearly rushed the Nook out prematurely "in hopes of stealing some of the Kindle’s holiday cheer," tech columnist David Pogue issued a sharp critique of the device in the New York Times.

Here's an abstract of Pogue's analysis:

• "That 'color touch screen,' for example, is actually just a horizontal strip beneath the regular Kindle-style gray screen...Worse, the touch screen is balky and nonresponsive...It takes nearly three seconds to turn a page — three times longer than the Kindle — which is really disruptive if you’re in midsentence."
• "It takes four seconds for the Settings panel to open, 18 seconds for the bookstore to appear (over Wi-Fi), and 8 to 15 seconds to open a book or newspaper for the first time, during which you stare at a message that says 'Formatting'.”
• “'Over one million titles?'” Yes, but well over half of those are junky Google scans of free, obscure, pre-1923 out-of-copyright books, filled with typos."
• "Fact is, Amazon’s e-book store is still much better. Of the current 175 New York Times best sellers, 12 of them aren’t available for Kindle; 21 are unavailable for the Nook."
• "Kindle books are less expensive."
• "What about the Nook’s built-in Wi-Fi? It’s there, but you get no notification when you’re in a hot spot. And if the hot spot requires a login or welcome screen, you can’t get onto it."
• "And the 'loan e-books to friends?' part? You can’t lend a book unless its publisher has O.K.’ed this feature...Furthermore, the book is gone from your own Nook during the loan period (a maximum of two weeks). And each book can be lent only once, ever."
• "It’s buggy. In four days, my Nook locked up twice and displayed an 'Android operating system has crashed' message twice."
  

Does Pogue have anything good to say? Well..."Now, the Nook may have some hardware advantages — a removable battery, a memory-card slot and (because of narrower plastic margins) a slightly trimmer shape — but the Kindle is still a better machine. It’s faster, thinner, lighter and much easier to figure out. Its battery lasts more than three times as long (seven days versus two)."

The bottom line for Pogue? "Those missing features are symptoms of B&N’s bad case of Ship-at-All-Costs-itis."

Read the full review here.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

The God of Dumb Names Strikes Again

How much money goes into developing an e-book reader or a reading software program? Millions of dollars, certainly. You would think that investors and developers would want to do everything in their power to protect their investment, right? And when it came to naming their device they would use the same skill and market research that car manufacturers bestow on, say, "Escalade", or that pharmaceutical corporations use to come up with "Flomax", yes? They would not leave it to some unimaginative functionary with a tin ear, would they? Because if they did, they would end up with some execrable word that makes it difficult if not possible for their e-reader to succeed. A name like...Flepia. Or Cool-er. Or WordsGear. Or Que.

Yes indeed, you would certainly think so. But those are the names of recently introduced e-readers. You can read about them in Another E-Book Reader with a Dumb Name. And then there's the Nook, whose modest success is certainly not due to the prurient associations its name evokes.

One would hope that any newcomer in the field would look at this sorry nomenclature and select a name rivaling the brilliance of "Kindle". So, it is with great bafflement that we report that in January Baker and Taylor will be introducing a book platform called...Blio. According to Mike Shatzkin, it's " the Next Big Thing in ebooks." It certainly sounds cool. Writes Shatzkin:

"Blio is a software client that can work on “any device with an operating system”, which means computers and iPhones, but not Kindles. Based only on the demo we saw from Baker and Taylor Senior VP Linda Gagnon last week (of course I’d rather be reporting on something I saw on my own computer or iPhone), the presentation is the best I’ve ever seen. The type is crisp and sharp, it has full multiple-media functionality (video, graphics, TTV, links to the web), and it does tricks, my favorite of which is that you can see (on a PC screen) many pages at a time dealt out like a deck of cards. Then you find the ones you want and hone in on them. There are many ways to use that capability, particularly for an illustrated how-to book or a textbook."

You can read about it in detail in Shatzkin's blog, and if he says it's brilliant, that's good enough for us. But...Blio? What does it mean? If it's a play on "Biblio", we're not sure how many users are going to get the pun. Did they mean to say "Brio"? That would have been a great name. Con Brio means "spirited" or "animated" (and if you're a developer feel free to use the word). If you google "Blio" the first thing you get is "Did you mean bilo?" If you google Baker and Taylor Blio you get "Did you mean Baker and Taylor bio?" Google on and you will learn that BLIO is an acronym for such places as North Carolina's Business License Information Office and the British Library, India Office.

We wish Baker and Taylor every success with its Blio and can't wait to see a demo. We just wonder if they aren't handicapping themselves with another dumb name.

Richard Curtis

Which E-Book Reader to Buy? NY Times Guides Holiday Shoppers

New York Times reporter Danielle Belopotosky has done us a big favor by lining up all the prominent e-book readers and comparing and contrasting them. If you're shopping for one as a gift - and e-readers are shaping up to be the runaway favorite gift for the holiday season - then Belopotosky's article is a must. And though, unsurprisingly, the Kindle still dominates the pack, her article makes it clear that "it’s no longer just Amazon’s story." In fact, she seems to favor Barnes & Noble's Nook, calling it "The e-reader of the moment."

Listed are:

AMAZON’S KINDLE, $259

NOOK FROM BARNES & NOBLE, $259
SONY READER TOUCH PRS-600, $300, AND DAILY READER, $400
QUE, FROM PLASTIC LOGIC (NO PRICE: DEBUTS JANUARY 7)
IREX DR800SG, $399
COOL-ER, FROM INTEREAD, $249
DISNEY DIGITAL BOOKS, $8.95 A MONTH

E-Reads has covered almost all of these devices, so go to our home page and enter the name of the e-book reader in the search box. And you must certainly check out Belopotosky's Something to Read in the New York Times.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

What Jeff Bezos Does in the Bathtub

Journalist and author Deborah Solomon, who has a regular Q&A feature in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, collars Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for a mini-interview in this morning's edition.

When asked to comment on Kindle's competitor Nook he properly declines until his interlocutress provokes him with the observation that, unlike the Kindle, a book on the Nook can be lent.

"The current thing being talked about is extremely limited," he reminds Solomon. "You can lend to one friend. One time. You can’t pick two friends, not even serially, so once you’ve loaned one book to one friend, that’s it."

This surprises the journalist who, like a courtroom lawyer, should never ask a question to which she doesn't know the answer. "You have to pick just one person? What are you saying? It’s like 'Sophie’s Choice'?"

"It is 'Sophie’s Choice'," replies Bezos. "Very nicely done." Touché!

Solomon also challenges Bezos when he tells her that Amazon takes a 65% cut of revenue from self-published digital books published by Amazon. "And Amazon keeps 65 percent?" she exclaims. "That sounds like a lot."

"Does it?" Bezos replies. "You’re an author, what does your royalty check look like? Are your royalties 35 percent?" Touché encore!

Bezos reveals how he reads a Kindle in the bathtub, and why it's infinitely better than reading a paper book there. A clue is provided by Chris Steib, pictured above, whose experiment was reported in Print is Dead.

To read the all-too-brief Q&A, read Questions for Jeffrey P. Bezos by Deborah Solomon.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Aerosol Makes Your Nook Smell Like Crunchy Bacon

A while back we wrote up a book lover who said she was reluctant to buy a Kindle "unless Amazon comes out with a special 'book scented' Kindle." (See If They Can Make the Kindle Smell Like a Book, Maybe She'll Buy One). It was all kind of a joke, but an enterprising manufacturer took it seriously enough to produce a line of aromatics simulating book scents. The aromas include New Book Smell and Classic Musty. The product is trademarked as Smell of Books™ and here's how their website describes it:

Does your Kindle leave you feeling like there’s something missing from your reading experience?
Have you been avoiding e-books because they just don’t smell right?
If you’ve been hesitant to jump on the e-book bandwagon, you’re not alone. Book lovers everywhere have resisted digital books because they still don’t compare to the experience of reading a good old fashioned paper book.
But all of that is changing thanks to Smell of Books™, a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer.
Now you can finally enjoy reading e-books without giving up the smell you love so much. With Smell of Books™ you can have the best of both worlds, the convenience of an e-book and the smell of your favorite paper book.
Smell of Books™ is compatible with a wide range of e-reading devices and e-book formats and is 100% DRM-compatible. Whether you read your e-books on a Kindle or an iPhone using Stanza, Smell of Books™ will bring back that real book smell you miss so much.

Among the five smells offered is "Crunchy Bacon". This is a welcome novelty for noses jaded by such natural book fragrances as grass, leather, printer's ink, and decaying paper. Hopefully, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France will invest heavily in shpritzing their collections with Crunchy Bacon. Some other but lesser known aromas associated with books are baked lamb shank, General Cho's Chicken, and asparagus vinaigrette.

On a more scientific note, Henry Fountain of the New York Times reports on research to quantify old-book odors to help librarians preserve books more effectively. Fountain describes how conservators "analyzed the volatiles produced by 72 samples of old paper of different types and in varying condition from the 19th and 20th centuries, using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. They found that some compounds were reliable markers for paper with certain characteristics — high concentrations of lignin or rosin, for example, which make paper degrade relatively quickly."

There was apparently no manifestation of crunchy bacon in the spectrum analyzed by the scientists, but it is well known that subatomic bacon particles are even more elusive to detect spectrometrically than the Higgs boson, and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN may be required to capture one.

Read Digging Into the Science of That Old-Book Smell.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Who is Alex and Why is He Suing the Nook People?

Spring Design's lawsuit against Barnes & Noble for misappropriating its Alex e-book reader caught us doubly flatfooted. On the one foot, we were shocked to learn that colossus B&N might have released its Nook without clearing its business relationship with a firm it had allegedly been consulting. On the other foot, we'd never heard of the Alex, and believe me we've been covering the field for years. In the words of a blogger for tech website Gizmodo, "When the Alex was released in October,`I thought that Spring Design was the copycat, but based on the lawsuit they filed for violation of intellectual property, it may be the other way around." Here are Alex (l.) and Nook (r.) side by side.

Every year lawsuits are filed by opportunistic companies alleging that their original invention - "A means of cooking food by application of a flame" - has been stolen by someone who fried onions on a stove. Most such suits are without merit. Spring Design's suit, on the surface, appears to have some respectable merits. The firm is not fly-by-night, having been founded in 2006. Its Duet Navigator™ dual screen design is trademarked and a patent is pending. According to the writeup reprinted in Gizmodo, Spring Design "has been working with major book stores, newspapers and publishers over the last two years, sharing the vision and the capabilities of the dual screen device."

Below is a video demo of Alex and on it certainly looks pretty Nookish from where we sit. More importantly, it might look Nookish to those sitting on a jury one day. The dual screens (b&w e-book reader on top, full color nav bar below) are similar and they both utilize the Android operating system. But let's give B&N every benefit of the doubt and say it was a coincidence - an example of two independent firms racing to get their product on stream first. That leaves only one question to be settled: The NDA.

"NDA" stands for "Non-Disclosure Agreement", a common practice used in business to protect a firm sharing trade secrets with another firm interested in establishing a business relationship. According to Barb Dybwad of Mashable.com, "Spring Design had apparently been working with Barnes & Noble since the beginning of this year under a non-disclosure agreement, with the original intent of collaborating on the device. Barnes & Noble executives reportedly praised the innovative features of the device without mentioning their plans to incorporate similar functionality into the Nook device they publicly disclosed last month." The lawsuit will probably hinge on whether B&N violated Spring Design's NDA.

A smoking NDA would certainly be compelling support for Spring Design's claim but not necessarily decisive. How do we know for instance that Spring didn't have NDAs with a hundred other firms, some of which breached the covenant and shared Spring's corporate secrets with B&N?

We'll be following this case raptly. Meanwhile, amusingly - no, hilariously - when you click on the Inside PR's article about the Nook lawsuit you'll see an ad for...Kindle! Proving that not everybody loses in a lawsuit.

Richard Curtis

The E-book Reader That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Do you know how to pronounce Scribd? Does it rhyme with "scribed"? Or "fibbed"? I've even heard it called "Scrib-dee".

How about Que, Plastic Logic's forthcoming e-book reader? Is it pronounced "Kay"? or "Cue"?

Next is the Flepia, Fujitsu's e-book reader. Is it Fleh-pia or Flee-pia?

Or the UK e-book reader called the Cool-er. As we recently wondered (see Another E-Book Reader with a Dumb Name), is that pronounced "color" (the device screen is black and white by the way)? Or do you pronounce it like the refrigerated water dispenser commonly found in business offices, suggesting it's cooler than the Kindle? Or maybe you come to a full glottal stop, thus: Cool. Er.

If I were a technology company investing millions of dollars to develop a device or service or product, it would make sense for me to ask a focus group to review it. And to make sure that focus group is stocked with people with dirty minds. Like Charles Curtis's.

Charles Curtis believes there is money to be made helping corporations avoid selecting embarrassing names for their products. He would call his service "Double Entendre Consulting". "The concept," he explains, "is this: say you're a startup with a company name, logo, slogan but you're nervous that there's something hidden in it that will make you a laughingstock. So you pay my company a fee and I, along with my fellow gross-minded colleagues, will review your selections and tell you if they're clean or if they will become fodder for viral hilarity on the Internet."

For example? "If Kids Exchange had hired us, we would have informed them that their URL, kidsexchange.net, spelled out something very different from what they intended. Same goes for an outfit called Who Represents? Their URL is Whorepresents.com.

"This idea came up in college when I used to frequent a fast food joint that prided itself on making great salads. Unfortunately, their slogan was, 'The Original Salad Tossers'. If you don't understand why that's so hilarious, click here. When I went back there years later, the slogan on their napkins had changed, so perhaps someone had informed them that sickos such as myself were rolling on the floor every time we mentioned their slogan. And teabagging? The Republicans, should have consulted me before they began advocating that practice. Click here to learn why."

Full disclosure Number 1: I sired this person. Full disclosure #2: if he does go into the double entendre business I intend to become a serious investor, because I think there's a fortune to be made in exposing dumb names.

And that brings us to The Nook.

Charles does not mention what he would have said to Barnes & Noble had they consulted with him about The Nook, BN.Com's newly minted and named e-book reader. But he might consider employing a blogger named Charissa, who wrote the following Open Letter to Barnes & Noble:

Dear Barnes & Noble,

What were you thinking?

Who on earth thought it would be a good idea to name you new E-Reader device the nook? I mean, really? Do you know anything about pop culture and slang from the last few decades? I would love to know what kind of focus groups you used to demo the name and marketing, or did you use focus groups at all? Because I don’t know who wouldn’t have told you this is a bad idea.

And did you even give a thought to what your booksellers are going to have to endure, answering questions about the nook(ie)? Not to mention all the jokes they’re going to be subject to. Trust me, there is an endless supply of nook jokes out there, from the innocent “nook, nook” jokes to more suggestive humor.

Not to mention the fact that within less than 24 hours of the nook’s announcement, some anonymous B&N employees have already begun re-writing Limp Bizkit’s “Nookie” in honor of the nook. Do you realize how obnoxious it is to have the words, “And you can take you Kindle and stick it up your…” stuck in your head all day long?

And it’s really bad that the device itself doesn’t even come out until the end of November and I’m already having trouble using the name in a sentence with a straight face. We still have more than a month of nook jokes to go.

I realize it’s too late to change the name now, but I really hope next time you’re a little more careful when selecting the name of something as monumental to the company as this device apparently is.

Sincerely,
A Concerned Citizen

PS – If you were to, say, give out free nooks to all your employees in an effort to encourage them to familiarize themselves with the device for customer questions, then I would be more than willing to forgive you for this minor naming indiscretion.

We wish the best of success to the makers of the Flepia, Que, Cool-er and Nook. They should be aware, though, that had they hired Double Entendre Consulting they might have avoided becoming, in the words of W. S. Gilbert, "a source of innocent merriment."

Richard Curtis, President of E-Reads (which is pronounced "Ee-Reeds", not "Eh-Reds")

Que Es Esto? Esto Es Un Que! Plastic Logic Device Name Revealed (We Think)

We can't stand it. Today we learned the names of not one but two e-book readers that had been kept tightly under wraps. The first, revealed earlier today, was BN.Com's Nook. But we were not prepared to win the bifecta. The announcement of the name of Plastic Logic's forthcoming device, which we've been begging to learn, came today hard on the heels of the Nook. The name?

QUE.

The full formal name is QUETM proReader, the "tm" standing for "trademark".

Gadgetell details the features of the long-heralded reader which will be launched on January 7 2010 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas:

Feature wise we can expect the QUE to have a an E Ink display that is both shatterproof and capacitive. Additionally that display will be the size of a regular sheet of paper, 8.5 x 11 inches with the complete unit coming in at less than a 1/3 inch thick.

Additionally, the QUE will also be Wi-Fi and 3G equipped with the 3G coming courtesy of the AT&T network. However it looks like it will not only be books that users will be downloading and reading as the press release also notes that the QUE will be able to offer “professional newspapers, books and periodicals” as well as read “PDF, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents”.

We assume it's pronounced "Kay" and not "Cue" but we haven't heard anybody actually utter it aloud. In any case we are hereby retiring "Teasle," the provisional title we assigned to it after wearying of calling it "Plastic Logic's unnamed e-book reading device." However, given the ambiguity of the term Que, we have to wonder if "Teasle" isn't actually the more memorable term.

Read all about it in Plastic Logic unveils and teases us with the QUE proReader ebook reader.

RC

And the Name of BN.Com's E-Book Reader Is...(the Envelope Please)

THE NOOK!

As in Book Nook.

As rumored, the E-Ink text is gray and white like the Kindle's, but there is a color feature for the display of cover and other images. The $259 price matches the current price for the Kindle. The Nook will carry over 1 million titles, about half of which are currently not available on the Kindle.

The device does not appear to be manufactured by Plastic Logic as speculated on a number of blogs. So we still await the disclosure of the name of Plastic Logic's reader scheduled for release in 2010. "The Nook" is taken, so Plastic Logic will have to dig deep into its pool of titles to come up with something more ingenious. Until it's official, we're calling it The Teasle.

A significant difference between Nook and Kindle is the Nook's e-book-lending feature, details of which will be described in future postings.

Though the name and features of the device were not to be disclosed until later today at a press conference, the New York Times used a clever ploy to scoop most other journalists: it peeked at at an advertisement BN.Com will be running in the newspaper's book review section next Sunday. The Times's own ombudsman Clark Hoyt, who writes a weekly column commenting on the ethical (or otherwise) conduct of its writers and executives, might have a few things to say about a newspaper that uses its own advertising department as a source of breaking news. Whether the name and nature of BN.Com's device was embargoed until Sunday is not known. Still, there are some tricky ethical issues at play here.

Any comment, Mr. Hoyt?

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting - AND ADVERTISING! - performed by the New York Times.