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It seems that Amazon.com's Kindle is not the flop that many predicted when the e-book reader debuted last year. Citibank's Mark Mahaney has just doubled his forecast of Kindle sales for the year to 380,000. He figures that Amazon's sales of Kindle hardware and software will hit $1 billion by 2010.

"Latest figs from AAP (Association of American Publishers) put ebook sales up 173.9% through end July 2009. A caveat to this …ebook sales made up just 0.6% of overall book sales in 2008 - according to Bowker - which explains the steep growth. So - the ebook sales graph shows a lovely looking curve, but the steepness is really to do with the starting point. Growth always looks impressive from a zero base! Let's look at the ebook market another way. If you read the headline about Amazon's Kindle, this sounds a bit like a revolution. Day one of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol and the Business Insider reports: "Kindle version of the book on top!" (The Business Insider 16.09.09) Steve Windwalker at the Kindle Nation blog says this could be "the biggest story of 2009 in the book trades." As he points out, the most popular book in the world is selling more copies as an electric version than a print version at the most popular bookstore in the world. Or, another version of the story - one week later - in the same news source: Kindle verdict: nothing special" The Business Insider, 22.09.09 "The Lost Symbol sold just 100,000 in e-books format according to Doubleday. Overall Doubleday sold 2 million copies. The 5% ratio of e-books to print is about in-line with the average for book sales."

The article is interesting, but I truly question the claim that Amazon will sell $1 Billion dollars worth of Kindle hardware and software by 2010. What is relevant to our study is the reader comments. It's not a scientific random sample, but they are easily accessible opinions of the Kindle.

"The Internet Archive and various like-minded partners have launched an open architecture for selling and lending digital books online, an effort to consolidate the fledgling market for net texts - and give Google a little food for thought. Dubbed BookServer, the open platform is meant to provide a standard means for booksellers, publishers, libraries, and individual authors to serve texts onto laptops, netbooks, smartphones, game consoles, and specialized ereaders a la the Amazon Kindle. The Archive has already demonstrated an early incarnation of the architecture with the Kindle and Sony's Reader Digital Book."

Doubts about the Kindle from students...

Adobe Systems Inc. this week announced its second major move in the e-book market in the last five months as the multimedia software vendor looks to build a consortium to take on Amazon.com Inc. and its market-leading Kindle e-book reader. On Monday, Adobe released Adobe Reader Mobile 9, which improves the way smartphones and handheld devices display books and other documents that use the open PDF format created by Adobe.

Our Interlibrary Loan Office was recently approved to officially start a pilot loaning Amazon Kindles to our university faculty.

Pricing and product information for the Kindle at Amazon.com

This is just a news announcement with speculation as to the new features.

can be deleted

Stanza, iPhone's free e-book reader application, has been downloaded more than 395,000 times and is installed at an average rate of about 5,000 copies a day, according to the app's creator Lexcycle.

"If one clear consensus emerged from the studies that have been finalized at Princeton University, Case Western Reserve University and the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, it is this: For students who were given the Kindle DX and tried to use it for coursework, the inability to easily highlight text was the biggest lowlight of the experience."

Findings: IPod touch coudl access 84% of Yale's ebook collection Kindle, Sony Reader, etc. could only access 24% of ebook collection