[ccebook.cn]The World in 2010

Business
The plot thickens
Nov 13th 2009
E-books will move further towards the mainstream
Rather than being a thriller that grabs you from the first sentence, the tale of the rise of electronic books (ebooks)
is more like a novel that takes a while to get into its stride. But things have now started to become
more exciting, and there are further plot twists and revelations coming. If you saw an e-book device for the
first time in 2008 and first played with one in 2009, perhaps you will buy one in 2010.
Amazon catalysed the e-book market with its appropriately named e-reader, the Kindle, launched in 2007. It
followed this up in early 2009 with the smaller, cheaper and more elegant Kindle 2, which costs $259, and the
larger Kindle DX, which is designed to display newspapers and textbooks. Now that the Kindle is available
outside America, users around the world can buy e-books from Amazon’s growing selection, which materialise
on the slate-like device’s grey-scale screen within a few seconds, thanks to the Kindle’s built-in wireless
connection. Clicking buttons on the edge of the device turns the virtual pages.
There was a flurry of other e-book deals and announcements during 2009. Google launched a mobile version
of its Google Books site, making hundreds of thousands of books available on mobile phones. Amazon
launched a Kindle application for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch, turning them, in effect, into mini-Kindles.
Amazon also bought Lexcycle, the maker of Stanza, another popular e-reader application for Apple’s touch-
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