The paperless world is coming! Reading via mobile devices is finally becoming a real option - Book 2.0 anyone?

For the past decade I have been looking hard for a new solution that spares me from having to print 100+ pages from various websites and blogs every single day, only to subsequently stuff 1500+ pages in my computer bag and end up making a huge mess in airport lounges around the world as well as on the plane, reading and desperately bookmarking (high-lighting) the best stuff.  A huge waste all-around and impossible to really retrieve anything.

Apart from reading even more PDFs like this one on my computer (which is far from convenient or easy-to-do), I have now discovered that some of my many mobile devices are actually starting to be very suitable alternatives for reading printed paper. Leading the pack here is of course the iPhone and the iPod Touch' and some select Nokia devices which I will cover in a separate post - I currently use both but the iPhone's app-store does make it a lot easier to give this a try.

Not only can I now read webpages that I have converted and stored for offline use via the cool instapaper app but now I can also read real books (well... not fiction, really - that would be a stretch) using the eReader app for the iPhone. The selection at eReader is not very large, yet, and the prices are quite high (surely that isn't their fault I would reckon), and of course there's DRM galore but it's still something worth looking at - convenience trumps those hurdles only for early adopters like me, though, that's for sure. 

I do wish that the publishers would wake up and see this as a much, much bigger opportunity than they seem to do, at this time: there is simply no reason whatsoever for a book to cost $15 via the eReader - give me a break please - there are no shipping and no printing costs. Darn - you could make this a real, liquid, low-cost, ubiquitous global business.

In any case, what I do now is to save the longer web-pages on my instapaper page (on the computer), sync with iPhone or one of my iPod Touch devices (it would be great to have that on the Nokia phones, too!), and then read it when in the taxi, on the train, or in the plane. For annotating stuff, I simply carry a small paper (!) notepad and pen so that I can quickly jot down the most important realizations from what I read - I have found that actually writing stuff down really makes a difference when trying to retain information, anyway, so that works fine for me.

Using Instapaper, the webpages are converted and very easy to read, btw, and scrolling is easy with the pro version. Next, if I want to read a book, I think I'll start using eReader for that (I am trying it with the free books right now) - but here again, if I could have a flat rate now that would be good; don't punish me for my interest, punish me for buying the dead tree version.

And if you live in the U.S. - which I don't - there is Amazon's Kindle which seems to be making some serious headway and the OLPC XO2 (see pics on Flickr) which allows book-like reading and looks great - hope they don't really get stuck with the MSFT OS, though.

The bottom line is this, and I think it's really exciting: easy and comfortable electronic reading is just now becoming a real possibility using mobile devices, and this will have serious impact on the entire publishing industry, from newspapers to magazines to books. As usual, if content owners and their representatives can ease up on the Control a bit I think we're looking at another huge opportunity for those that actually create the content to begin with. The business models?  Stay tuned - I am working on it;)

Watch this eReader video, below

Comments

[Martin J. Thörnkvist]

Agree, it's time for book publishers to take the decisions music labels have failed to do:
http://www.digitalrenaissance.se/2008/08/25/book-publishers-look-listen-learn/

[jay]

For the iPhone-less you can use your regular cell phone as a book reader.

http://www.booksinmyphone.com gives away books packaged up as java apps.

If you have internet connectivity for your phone go to http://mobile.booksinmyphone.com and with a few clicks you can find and install a book. There are details of other install methods on the main website.

The reader is very simple to use, remembers where you are up to, and has a great 'night mode' for reading without disturbing your spouse.