e-book

Organizers of the Frankfurt Book Fair said Tuesday that book sales have stood up so far to the global economic crisis, but acknowledged that the industry is changing.

"The publishing industry is doing well," Gottfried Honnefelder, head of the German Booksellers Association, told reporters as the annual fair opened. "Books are resistant to economic cycles, an indication that they are not luxury items, but basic necessities."

The battle over e-readers is heating up rapidly, thanks to new hardware entries from the world's two leading e-book manufacturers and the surprising popularity of e-book software on Apple's iPhone and iPod touch. Although the total number of e-books is still well short of a single Steven King press run, the next-generation devices point to a steadily maturing market for digital literature.

On Friday, Sony announced the latest version of its e-reader, the Sony PRS-700 Reader. The device will be released next month and will cost approximately $400.

In a move to compete with Amazon's Kindle e-book reader, Sony on Thursday launched a new Reader that leverages some of the Apple iPhone's strengths.

Specifically, the Sony PRS-700 Reader boasts an interactive touchscreen display that promises an intuitive digital reading experience. The latest addition to Sony's Reader lineup has the dimensions of a slimmed-down paperback book in a textured black casing with a soft black cover. It weighs about 10 ounces. The new Reader will be available next month for about $400.

A number of news outlets say they have confirmed that Amazon.com is on the verge of releasing an updated version of its Kindle e-book reader. And, rumors say, Amazon will change its focus from mass-market books to the education market.

Tim Bueneman, an analyst with McAdams Wright Ragen, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that Amazon sees a major opportunity for the Kindle with college students. He also told the paper that Amazon is planning several new versions of the device.

Amazon will ship new versions of its Kindle e-book reader before year's end. The original reader launched last November sold out in its first week and had Amazon scrambling to fill holiday orders. While sales have been brisk, estimates vary.

Wait. Scroll. Scroll. Tap-tap. Wait. Wait. For many years, that was the typical experience of someone surfing the Web using a mobile phone or PDA, at least in the U.S. Although some content providers offered stripped-down versions of their sites specially designed for mobile users, most did not, and reading a page designed to be viewed on a PC on the small screen was about as much fun as sitting in a dark room reading a newspaper by flashlight.

Amazon and Simon & Schuster have inked a deal to bring 5,000 new titles to the Kindle e-book reader this year. Amazon's Kindle is a portable e-book reader that wirelessly downloads books, blogs, magazines, newspapers and personal documents to a high-resolution electronic paper.

Simon & Schuster's latest e-book initiative will more than double the number of the publisher's titles currently available on Kindle. Kindle customers will be able to discover, buy and read popular books such as Stephen R. Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.