info NeoGnostic: e-Book readers seen as fillip for authors

: Name: Chris Armstrong; Location: Aberystwyth, Wales, United Kingdom

I am the owner and managing director of Information Automation Limited (IAL), a company that specialises in research, consultancy and training for the information profession. We are particularly interested in all forms of electronic information resources (e-journals, e-books, etc) and I teach a course in electronic publishing at the Department of Information Studies in Aberystwyth. Drilling down still further(!), my interests centre on the quality and evaluation of electronic information, and in the thinking that underpins activities in library and information science.

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Thursday, February 02, 2006

e-Book readers seen as fillip for authors

An article in the January 21st Wall Street Journal - A Hundred Books in Your Pocket - celebrates the new Sony e-book Reader. While not yet sure whether the current generation of readers based on e-ink (like the Sony) will be a success, the author IS sure that very soon e-book readers will take off. While readers may enjoy the ease with which they can carry a library around in their pockets, the article suggests that what will carry e-book readers forward is the way that they encourage self-publishing. Just as jazz composer Maria Schneider and others have published using ArtistShare, e-books will liberate authors from publishers and book shops.
Whether this is necessarily a good thing for readers is debatable, but there is already a discernable book self-publishing fraternity on the Web, and print books on how to self-publish e-books have been published. e-Book readers seem to be having something of a renaissance as Sony's Reader is not the only one launched this Spring. As reported here in January, iRex Technologies is launching the Iliad.

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