Fredish Smörgåsbord

Although a lot of people are excited about ebooks, it’s very difficult to get hard information on how the market for them is growing. We don’t even know how many Kindles Amazon has sold, let alone more detailed specifics on the market.

So I was very happy Wednesday when the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) gave details from its recent survey of ebook adoption in the US. The survey was first revealed in January, but the press release was very sketchy and sometimes confusing. In its presentation at the Tools of Change conference, the BISG gave much more details on the results.

Well, there might be *a lot* of Kindles are there in the field, but maybe not that many. It's not about how strong Apple is or what, it's about how fast people are really adopting e-books.

With the market for electronic book readers set to take off, things are looking up for a little-known Taiwanese company that will probably supply most of the “e-paper” they use.

The company, Prime View International, said this summer that it would pay about $215 million to acquire E-Ink, which owns the technology for displaying text in the most popular readers, including Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader.

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DisplaySearch, a market researcher based in Austin, Texas, forecasts the global market for e-paper, including e-paper used in e-books, to hit $5.9 billion by 2015, from $400 million this year.

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It was also a good fit considering Prime View’s pedigree. The company is a subsidiary of Yuen Foong Yu Group, a Taiwanese paper and pulp company. The group started making toilet paper and paperboard as early as 1939 and began producing coated paper in the 1950s with Japanese technology, according to its Web site.

While eBooks in the future may not be in the form we've imagined, however e-paper that only consumes power when switching colors (only black/white for now) will eventually take off to replace a certain share of "permanent" paper usage. PVI may not be the last standing, but its mother company indeed has the money and the position to give it a try. I am giving it an optimistic eye.

也許將來的電子書不一定是我們現在看到或想像的樣子（類似平板電腦的造型），但只在轉換顏色（目前僅有黑白）時才耗電的電子紙（e-paper或e-ink）遲早會起飛，取代今天部分紙張長時間、高價值顯示的用途。

在電子紙的發展和競爭過程中，元太科技（PVI）不一定是最後的贏家，因為其他廠商的技術、資金等門檻相對不算太高，但它的母公司永豐餘應該算是比較有錢、而且也比較順利成章的來涉足這個領域。

撇開資金、併購、政治這些「非產品」、「非技術」的面向不談，我對電子紙這個產業的遠景和產值是樂觀的；過一陣子再來看我想的對不對。:)

In today's Observer Business column, John Naughton discusses what a ripoff it is for ebook vendors to "sell" you books with abusive, multi-thousand word "license agreements," pretending that because you bought your book over the network, it wasn't a sale, and so you don't get to own it. These "licenses" aren't about upholding copyright (if they were, you could replace thousands of words of lawyerese with four simple words: "Don't violate copyright law"). They're about overriding copyright -- which has all kinds of guarantees for the rights of book-owners -- with a private law that gives every advantage to the publisher or retailer, converting you from a noble reader to a wormy, contemptible licensor who doesn't deserve to own books.

Anyone reads EULA today? I do. But I don't have a kindle and I don't even trust it as a model of the next-generation of "books". The debates, confrontations and conflicts of the rights among eBook writers, publishers, distributors and customers still have a long way to go.

電子書的所謂版權和所有權等等問題，到現在還是沒有公認的標準，而是先訂標準、先有產品的人就贏；這也是為什麼各家廠商搶著插頭香的原因之一。在電子書的市場性方面，我並不看好Kindle、也不認為它會是個往後必當遵循的典範。

這類權利衝突的好戲，這陣子還有得看。

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