Mass Romance Novel Publisher Going All In On E-Books

With a dramatic fall in sales of its range of books, one publisher has decided to take the eBooks route. Here is the story in full:

E-books are becoming more popular by the minute thanks to devices like the Kindle, Nook, and iPad, but major dead tree publishers have been hesitant to go all in—until now. Dorchester Publishing, which describes itself as the “oldest independent mass market publisher in America,” has decided to ditch its mass printing business to go digital- and print-on-demand only.

Unsurprisingly, Dorchester had a little nudge in that direction: the publisher said that sales of its books had declined a whopping 25 percent in just the last year, while its e-book sales are expected to double in 2011. The company specializes in romance, thriller, sci-fi, and fantasy novels and sells directly to major retailers like Wal-Mart.

“It wasn’t a long, drawn out decision, because we’ve been putting in the effort but not getting the results,” Dorchester CEO John Prebich told the Wall Street Journal.

Amazon recently said that Kindle book sales had surpassed the company’s sales of hardcover books in the last three months—a trend that many expect to continue now that the Kindle is even cheaper than before. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos even made the bold prediction that Kindle book sales might eclipse paperbacks within the next year.

Though some consider that prediction to be just short of delusion, it’s clear that e-books are (at least) on a positive trajectory. Whether that trajectory will enough to overcome the apparent drop in traditional media sales for Dorchester is another story, but the company says it expects to make big savings from cutting out printed books.

It’s unclear, however, whether that expectation includes some of its partners walking away: “It’s been a good run, but if they aren’t publishing mass-market paperbacks, we’ll have to decide what to do,” said Charles Ardai, owner of Hard Case Crime, which distributes its books through Dorchester.

This story was from Wired Magazine and written by Jacqui Cheng and can be found here: http://bit.ly/bdMXXG

E-books pave way for more blockbusters, serials

(Reuters) - Stieg Larsson copycats take note: The slow rise of electronic books is paving the way for more safe-bet fiction blockbusters and serial-type books, at least in the short term, according to some book experts.

With book sales stagnating in recent years, the nascent e-books market has thrown the industry into turmoil. In response, large publishers are taking fewer financial risks and betting more of their dollars on established authors, said Eileen Gittins of self-publishing company Blurb.com.
"In the face of these economics, publishers just cannot take the risk," said Gittins. "They need some sure wins."

Similar to movie studios' betting on well-known franchises to bring box office gold, Gittins said publishers want to market more blockbuster authors writing serial books featuring a distinctive leading character to lure repeat readers, as was seen with the success of prolific, late Swedish author Stieg Larsson, or crime fiction writers such as Michael Connelly.

With prices on the fledging e-book market still being battled over among larger publishers and makers of electronic readers, publishers still have yet to profit much from e-books, with the lower priced e-books eating into profit margins.

The e-book market has grown rapidly with wholesale revenue from e-book sales in the United States increasing to $91 million in the first quarter of 2010 from $55.9 million from the last quarter of 2009, according to International Digital Publishing Forum. But e-book sales still only account for 5-6 percent of overall U.S. book sales and less than 1 percent in Britain, The Financial Times reported this week.

Contrary to popular opinion, most of publishers' costs are developing and marketing authors, not the cost of printing and shipping books. Such costs don't lessen with e-books even though they sell for less than paper books, Gittins said.
That heightens pressure "to need to do blockbuster big titles because now there is even more pressure on them," said Gittins. "They are not really saving money with the e-book, all those costs are still there."

SAFE-BETS
Book experts predict in the e-book market, bestselling authors will remain popular in the short term. According to Amazon, all three of Stieg Larsson's books, which include sensation "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," sit in the top five best-selling books on Amazon's Kindle reader.
Customer favorites for e-books include "great Summer reads" such as Stephenie Meyer's new novella.

Daily Beast book editor Lucas Wittmann said in five years e-book sales could reach levels to make up for lost paper book sales, but for now publishers are feeling the pinch.
"There is a big squeeze right now," said Wittmann. "All the great predictions for e-books haven't quite been realized yet. E-books are growing at an astounding rate but they are not yet making up for the lost (book) sales."
When e-books first hit the market, some nonfiction economic and political books fared well, but now as the e-book audience had widened, more fiction is selling, he said.
"Publishers are still experimenting," Wittmann added.

Publishers Weekly Editorial Director Jim Milliot said online sites such as Amazon.com encourage readers to buy the same author, while smaller publishers were slow on e-books.
"A lot of the independent publishers have been slower to move to put their titles on, mainly because they don't have the resources to do it," he said. "Fiction seems to be winning out, at least in the early going."

As electronic readers improve, the type of e-books that sell well could change. Improving graphics could help genres like nonfiction and children's books become more popular.
"The possibilities seem to be opening up for more graphic work, incorporating multimedia and embedding links to audio when you are reading a biography of Bach or something," Wittmann said, predicting such advances in a year or two.

Wittmann said there will still be some "pain in the industry" but diversity and change was coming.
"Most publishers...are warming to e-books and thinking creatively about them," he said. "The only question is the time frame ... when we see a truly dramatic shift."

Original posted by Stieg Larsson and can be found here: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65O4XG20100625 

If eBooks Are the Future, Do Publishers Have a Plan?

Written originally in November of 2009 by Linda Dishman, the question does need to be asked, what now for publishers? I believe the question has not been answered. However, I believe that the question will be answered in a way most of us have not imagined. Here is where you can find the original piece - http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/lydia-dishman/all-your-business/are-ebooks-brave-new-world-profitability-publishers. Enjoy the piece: 

The numbers are in, and eBooks may very well be the bright spot in book publishing's dim future--but only if publishers can figure out a way to keep the momentum going.

EBook sales accounted for $46.5 million as of the end of September, according to the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), but that number only represents trade eBook sales through wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double these figures due to industry wholesale discounts, says IDPF. It's a drop in the bucket for book sales overall, which amounted to about $1.26 billion for the month of September, according to the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

What's most astonishing, though, is that eBooks have sold like hotcakes without a marketing or sales strategy. Publishers are moving quick to catch up as new digital innovations come to market.

"Everybody's awake now," says Mike Shatzkin, a 40-year industry veteran and founder of the Idea Logical Company, a firm of digital publishing futurists. He lauds larger publishers such as Random House and Hachette for being way ahead in terms of the mechanics of getting eBooks to market. But one of the publishers' biggest problems, he says, is that their selling strategies are built around book formats, and not about the interests of the people reading those books.

Brian O'Leary, founder of Magellan Media, a publishing industry consultancy, agrees that the approach to finding the eBookworms varies from publisher to publisher. For instance, he notes many of Hachette Book Group's titles have had simultaneous print, audio, and e-book versions that are marketed and sold using common campaigns.

HarperStudio's publisher, Bob Miller, acknowledged that their overall strategy so far, is integrated with their print program because many of their eBooks and digital audiobooks have traditional print versions. This from the HarperCollins imprint that rocked the publishing world recently when they announced a 50-50 profit-sharing deal with authors--a departure from the traditional 7% to 15% royalty-- and publishers of the multi-media "Vook" CRUSH IT!

Miller speculates that commercial fiction categories such as thriller, mystery, suspense, romance, and science fiction will continue to sell briskly in digital format. "Readers of these genres will continue to like the convenience and low cost of this format and are less concerned about having the physical book to keep on a shelf," he says.

But O'Leary suggests publishers such as HarperStudio would do well to take a page from the genre publisher's playbook. Though he's not advocating a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy, he notes that Harlequin has enjoyed much success by marketing short-form digital downloads for Nocturnal Bites separately, and recently announced the start of a digital-only imprint.

Indeed, Harlequin Enterprise Ltd.'s Brent Lewis, vice president of digital and Internet for Harlequin Enterprises Ltd., has been leading the strategic charge of Harlequin's digital publishing and marketing programs that now reach over 50 million readers in ebooks and digital audio, as well as on Harlequin's own site, in mobile distribution, and digital-only content.

Lewis' revealed Harlequin's not-so-secret ingredient in an interview with Fast Company last year: their consumers. "At Harlequin we have a very powerful brand that people have been very loyal and engaged to since the business began."

While Harlequin has its finger on the (ahem) throbbing pulse of its readers, it will be interesting to see what strategies evolve at Random House when industry vet and ex-Amazon employee Madeline McIntosh assumes the newly created position of President, Sales, Operations, and Digital on December 1. Her appointment will "unify their physical and digital sales efforts for adult, children's, and international titles, distribution, publishing operations, IT, and corporate digital-publishing capabilities in an interconnected team,"according to a statement from Markus Dohle, Random House chairman and CEO.

They managed to pull out a blockbuster under current leadership. Crain's New York Business reported sales of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol sold 100,000 e-books its first week out, or about 5% of total sales for the book. September ebook sales at Random House (much of which are presumably The Lost Symbol) pulled in $22.6 million, which is a 700% increase over Kindle sales last year. While every month can't be a Dan Brown blow-out, a good marketing strategy to find and retain loyal readers will help shore up the revenue model.

Right now, Shatzkin says eBooks are more profitable than print because there is no physical inventory, and in many cases the publisher has negotiated lower royalty payments (and other than the aforementioned specific instances, no one seems to have a marketing plan). As such, he believes Amazon, proprietors of the Kindle eReader, is subsidizing publishers for digital editions because the price they are paying up front for a digital edition is the same as for the print version.

O'Leary believes this too, will change. As publishers gain experience and sales grow, the cost of creating them will fall. "In the last year retail prices for e-books have been set lower than their print counterparts. If those lower prices stick, they will leave little room for retailer or publisher profitability under the traditional publishing model," he adds.

Yet Shatzkin wonders whether good marketing strategies and proper branding of digital books won't keep them from being cost prohibitive to the consumer. "There is plenty out there to read that's free. Will the public plunk down $25 for Ted Kennedy's eBook?" he asks, then responds, "I think it will take a while to answer that question."

Is the iPad Driving E-Book Piracy, and Does It Matter?

If you wanted to know how many pirated e-books are being downloaded, BitTorrent would be a good starting place. TorrentFreak, a blog that covers these speedy, P2P downloads, recently decided to check the numbers. The question: did e-book torrent downloading become more popular after the iPad’s launch?

The answer was a resounding “kinda.” While almost none of Amazon’s top ten appeared on public torrent trackers, six out of 10 books in the business category were available. When TorrentFreak checked the before and after numbers, it found that the number of BitTorrent book downloads grew by an average of 78 percent in the days after the iPad went on sale. Even so, the numbers were still tiny compared to the traffic in movies and music.

What does this mean? First, e-book piracy is still a small problem. Right now it’s a very geeky pastime, which is reflected in the skew of these titles (Getting Things Done, Freakonomics and The Tipping Point were on the TorrentFreak list). This matches up with the usual early adopter profile, the people who would have bought the iPad on its opening weekend.

But where geeks go first, the general public will follow. This happened with music. Now almost nobody I know buys CDs: They pirate, and even my most hardcore book-loving friend is now a Kindle convert. So will the iPad bring this attitude to books?

First, there is the problem of digitizing books. Right now, the best place to download e-books is via irc (Internet Relay Chat), online chatrooms that predate the web. The shared books are tiny text files. Storage and download speed are no problem, but the subject matter is heavily skewed toward popular trash and sci-fi. Original files come from those with enough time and patience to scan, OCR (optical character recognition) and proofread the resulting files, but the majority of what you find are duplicates of these. Contrast this to music, where you pop a CD into your computer and wait a few minutes while it rips the tracks and downloads the metadata.

It is unlikely that there will be a way to scan books so easily at home anytime soon, but what about sharing e-books themselves? If Apple makes its iBooks app available on the Mac or PC, then copying an entire book, even if protected by DRM, will be as simple as automating screenshots of pages and sending them to an OCR program. Only a single copy of a book will need to be pirated thusly and it will then be compromised forever.

Blaming the iPad is stupid, though. If it causes a rise in book piracy, it is only because it is driving demand. The book industry should embrace this and give us what we want: cheap books, published day-and-date with their paper equivalents, along with all back-catalog titles made available. And preferably DRM-free.

There is evidence that this is happening already. The iBooks Store will be rolling out with the iPad as it goes on sale across the world. The iTunes Music Store, by contrast, took years to negotiate itself into non-U.S. markets, and in many countries you still can’t get movies or TV shows. That these deals are in place mere months after the iPad was announced shows that the book industry is at least trying to move into the digital future.

The iPad is fast shaping up to be the go-to e-reading device. Between Apple’s iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle for iPad and the slew of other e-readers in the App Store (although curiously, our favorite Stanza is still absent on the iPad), you can buy and read almost any e-book out there. Blaming the iPad for kicking-off book piracy is foolish. It’s an opportunity, and if book publishers mess it up, they have already seen what happened to the recording industry.

This piece was written by Charlie Sorrel and can be found here: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/05/is-the-ipad-driving-e-book-piracy-and-does-it-matter/

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Is iPad supercharging eBook piracy?

Here is the piece for your perusal:

Recently, Scott Turow, the best-selling author of legal thrillers, including "Innocent"--his just released sequel to "Presumed Innocent"--was named president of The Authors Guild. That Turow, a practicing lawyer, was named president is probably no coincidence, considering the myriad issues that authors and publishers now face as digital books and e-book readers not only disrupt the marketplace but leave it vulnerable to that nasty little vermin commonly known as piracy.

In an interview with Media Bistro's Galley Cat (see video below), Turow talked about how author royalty rates for e-books were too low, but the larger problems for authors and publishers involved piracy. "It has killed large parts of the music industry," he said. "Musicians make up for the copies of their songs that get pirated by performing live. I don't think there will be as many people showing up to hear me read as to hear Beyonce sing. We need to make sure piracy is dealt with effectively."

Why this suddenly more-alarming tone? Well, though Turow recognizes that the iPad has clearly taken the e-reader to a whole new level, he doesn't specifically single out the iPad as the No. 1 catalyst for pirating. But I am. 

To put it in the context of the music world, it goes something like this: You remember the first MP3 players to catch on? They were from a company called Rio and the early ones used SmartMedia memory cards as their storage medium. Then there were more Rios, and most of them were really pretty good (I still run with a Rio Chiba). I look at these players as the Kindles, Nooks, and Sony Readers of the e-reader world. 

But then the iPod showed up. Sure, there had been piracy ever since people started burning CDs, but the iPod was the big accelerant. You can say what you want about iTunes ruining the music industry with its 99-cent single-track downloads (why buy the whole album for $10, when you can buy just the two good songs on it for $2?), but the fact that so many millions of people were carrying around iPods that could store thousands of songs only fueled the transition to fully digital music, no discs attached.

As e-readers go, Amazon won't let us know exactly how many Kindles it has sold, but most estimates put it in the 2 million to 3 million range, give or take a few hundred thousand. Apple sold a million iPads in a month. And though sheer numbers and critical mass are important, what's more alarming is what the iPad can do. No, it can't support Flash, but it sure does a nice job with PDF files and a host of other document formats that can be easily imported to the device via the appropriate app, most of which cost less than $3. (GoodReader, which I use for PDF files, costs 99 cents; you transfer files to the app via iTunes.) 

A quick scope of Pirate Land reveals a hodgepodge of content in a variety of formats, and other bloggers have already touched upon this aspect of e-book piracy in other pieces. I particularly liked an article done earlier in the year by The Millions' C. Max Magee titled, "Confessions of a Book Pirate," in which MacGee does a Q&A with a BitTorrent uploader who goes by the handle The Real Caterpillar. My favorite Caterpillar quote:

"Perhaps if readers were more confident that the majority of the money went to the author, people would feel more guilty about depriving the author of payment. I think most of the filesharing community feels that the record industry is a vestigial organ that will slowly fall off and die--I don't know to what extent that feeling would extend to publishing houses since they are to some extent a different animal. In the end, I think that regular people will never feel very guilty 'stealing' from a faceless corporation, or to a lesser extent, a multimillionaire like [Stephen] King."

This guy, like most e-book pirates--or the ones uploading the files--tends to take the time to scan the physical books into a computer, obtains the text via OCR (optical character recognition), makes corrections, and converts them to a variety of file formats. The same goes for comic books, which are being rampantly shared on The Pirate Bay. As you might have guessed, a number of comic book reader apps are available for the iPad and its large high-resolution color screen, turning it into the perfect digital comic book reader. And let's not leave out magazines, which are also being scanned and uploaded to BitTorrent sites.

At the moment, book piracy is dwarfed by that of the music, movie, and game industries. But it is gradually growing. Shortly after the launch of the iPad, TorrentFreak took a look at a small group of popular business titles and calculated that unauthorized e-book downloads on BitTorrent grew by 78 percent on average--and that was when Apple had sold only about 300,000 iPads.

Ironically, though the early lack of standardization may have adversely fragmented the e-book market, it may have also slowed down piracy. The Kindle still has its own platform and file format for e-books, but most of the big e-reader players, including Apple, have now adopted the ePub format.

It seems that most of the EPUB files available are converted from PDF files (scans of books), but what's scary is how compact the files are (less than 1MB) and how easy they are to load into iBooks and other e-readers that support the EPUB format. Though the size of movies and games can easily exceed 1GB and take hours to download (just ask folks who own the PSP Go how they long they have to wait to download games they've legally purchased), e-books can be shared in a few seconds. It seems that it's only a matter of time before file sharers move from exploiting the "analog hole" (scanning a hardcopy book) to the digital world of cracking copy-protection schemes and stripping legally bought e-books of their DRM.

For now, readers who are upset with the rising price of e-books have taken to posting low ratings on books on Amazon. Turow's "Innocent," for instance, sells for $14.99 as an e-book, which is essentially what the hardcover costs, and certain readers have given the book one-star ratings to express their displeasure. Turow is quite aware of the situation, but still supports his publisher's pricing scheme, arguing that if you don't want to pay $15 for the e-book, buy the hardcover (or wait for the e-book to go down in price). He's right, but certain people get angry when they feel they're getting a raw deal, and, like the publishers who are free to price their e-books however they want, these protesters are free to rate books however they want. As an author, it is incredibly aggravating, because you have no control over pricing--only the publisher does.

Free markets and free speech aside, I have my doubts that higher pricing for e-books is a good long-term strategy. Alas, as we've learned from the music industry, keeping prices steady at around $10 to $12 an album has done nothing to help combat piracy and may have, in fact, contributed to it. Eventually, more people are going to go from leaving bad ratings on books at Amazon to doing something more vindictive, like uploading DRM-free EPUB files to file-sharing sites. And mega-bestselling writers like J.K. Rowling, author of the "Harry Potter" series, are finding out that readers also get angry when you don't make your book available as an e-book. "Harry Potter" books are among the most heavily pirated out there.

How much is pirating hurting the publishing industry? Well, in that same "Confessions of a Book Pirate" article, Magee cites a study done by Attributor, a "firm that specializes in monitoring content online," that claims that "book piracy costs the industry nearly $3 billion, or over 10 percent of total revenue." Most people think that figure is very inflated, but the point is there are some big numbers involved and they only stand to get bigger as powerful e-readers like the iPad become more prevalent and tempt people to acquire content without paying for it because, well, too many of them have become used to it.

If there's a silver lining, it's that people don't read anymore. At least that's what Steve Jobs said in January 2008 in The New York Times when the Kindle first appeared.

"It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore," he said. "Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."

Of course, that was then, and this is now: Apple is now a full-fledged bookseller, going head to head with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders--not to mention any place else you can buy books, from Wal-Mart to your local drugstore. When the company announced that it had sold 1 million iPads in a month, it also bragged that iPad users had downloaded 1.5 million e-books from its iBooks Store. I assume the host of free public-domain e-books in Apple's catalog make up a large portion of that number (although it apparently doesn't include the freebie "Winnie the Pooh" that was offered with the iBooks app). So the appetite is there, particularly if the price is right.

What do you guys think?

This question-piece is from David Carnoy of CNET. You can read the original piece here: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-18438_7-20005008-82.html.

eBook Piracy "Surges" after iPad Launch

This blog was written by Ernesto on TorrenFreak. Here is the original address: http://torrentfreak.com/ebook-piracy-surges-after-ipad-launch-100409/ 

Here is the blog: 

With 500.000 iPads sold in the first week, Apple’s new multi-gadget is already a force to be reckoned with. As book publishers see the iPad as a potential threat to their revenues, we take a look to find out what happened to eBook piracy in the last week. The results are surprising.

The introduction of Apple’s iPod marked a significant change in the music industry’s business. When it was first released in 2001 there were no digital music stores online. By the end of that decade the number of digital music sales had outgrown physical sales by far. 

This year the book industry may see the definite breakthrough for eBooks, and again an Apple device is expected to play a facilitating role. Having watched the changes in the music industry where piracy is often portrayed as a huge threat, some book publishers already fear the worst.

The million dollar question is whether or not these fears are justified. How big of a threat is eBook piracy for the book industry? Is there a noticeable iPad effect? We have some interesting numbers to share.

To determine if Apple’s iPad has had en affect on eBook piracy we looked at the number of downloaded titles before and after its introduction. We decided to focus our research on the 10 best selling eBooks on Amazon which seemed to be a good starting point. The problem, however, is that none of these books are available on public BitTorrent, nor could we find them on file-hosting services or Usenet.

This in itself is quite an interesting observation, and clearly a signal that eBook piracy is not (yet) as widespread as that of music and movies. In order to come up with some comparison material we decided to change our sample to the 10 best selling paperback books in the business category, which should also fit well with the demographics of iPad buyers.

From this list 6 of the 10 books were available on BitTorrent. Although we have to note that BitTorrent may not be the only source of eBook piracy, it should give us a good indication of the iPad effect, if there is any. To do so, we tracked the download numbers from Saturday till Thursday, a week before the iPad launch and the days after. 

By comparing the data from these two samples we found that the number of unauthorized eBook downloads on BitTorrent grew by 78% on average, a significant increase. It is worth noting that all of the six eBooks had more downloads after the iPad launch than before.

David Allen’s productivity guide ‘Getting Things Done’ was by far the most downloaded eBook with an average of 435 downloads a day, up from 277 before the introduction of the iPad. However, this 57% increase is relatively small compared to some of the other titles we tracked.

‘Freakonomics’, another classic in the business section, saw a 104% increase in downloads, going from 187 to 381. ‘How We Decide’ saw an even bigger surge in downloads – 140% – as downloads went from 56 to 134. 

The three remaining books from the list that we tracked on BitTorrent are ‘The Tipping Point’, ‘How Women Decide’ and ‘The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People’. These three titles all saw an increase in downloads, 21%, 47% and 71% respectively, with absolute download numbers after the iPad launch of 192, 52 and 82. 

Interesting data, but what can we conclude from the statistics?

First of all, there seems to be a significant iPad effect if we assume that the increase in downloads is in part related to the iPad introduction. On the other hand it is clear that the absolute download numbers are relatively small compared to those of music and films, where popular releases can have more than a million downloads in one week. 

This low piracy figure can in part be explained by the fact that the number of people with an iPad or other eBook reader is still relatively low. Another key factor is that most books are simply not available in a pirated version, so buying a book through an online store is far more convenient and faster than trying to find an unauthorized copy.

The convenience factor and the overall user experience are going to be the key advantages for the book industry. When the iPod was launched there were no digital download stores, making file-sharing networks the only option to get music easily.

As a final note we have to stress that piracy does not equal lost sales. In the academic publications that looked into the link between piracy and (music) sales, there is still no consensus on this topic. For now, the book industry is best off putting all their efforts into making a great product for consumers and we’re sure that the iPad can be of assistance there. 

In the months to come we will keep en eye on how eBook piracy evolves.

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One reason why the iPad could be the eBook Reader Killer

I recently received a present from older brother - a MacBook Pro. I received it about a week and a half before my birthday. This present really made my century not my day. It took me a little while to get used to the MacBook considering I have used a Windows based PC since I started anything computing. As I got used to using the MacBook, I noticed one key thing - the ease on the eyes while reading.

Seriously? Yes, seriously. Although I cannot speak for everyone, I am sure there are many who can say the same thing. Some of you might think I am plugging Apple products, but I assure this is not the case. When something is of good quality, let us not be hypocritical about it. Anyone who has tried to read eBooks on a laptop will know that after reading about two or three pages, the eyes begin to feel the strain. In addition, if you are wearing glasses, heaven help you.

However, reading on the MacBook has nothing short of fantastic. It has been easy and I have finished reading four eBooks within a two-week span. I will tell you that I have never done that on my laptop. I have a wonderful HP laptop and I would not trade it for the World.



This now brings me to the real topic - the iPad. I read a headline recently that the iPad is the eBook reader killer. Going by my experience with my new MacBook Pro, I could say yes even if it is just for the ease of reading. I have not yet had a chance to use the iPad - and I will get a chance very soon - but if the reviews are anything to go by, then Apple is in for some serious profits. For those of you who got to see CNBC’s Charlie Rose Show will have heard the comments made by the journalists who got to use the iPad for a few weeks. We all know they were very impressed.

As I mentioned earlier, I have not yet got the chance to use the iPad but if it is great to read with as the MacBook is, then I might just trade in both my Aluratek and Sony eReaders for one. What do you think?

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