Project Gutenberg recently received an email from MarketIntellNow, a Maryland-based, six-year old market research firm that focuses on nascent niches. They do a lot of polling using a methodology called “ANWO”, they then blog about the results at a high level (for free) while selling the resulting report in their eStore.
Of late they have started examining the world of eBooks and just recently polled 5,000 Netizens on the subject.
I emailed them back to see if they could pass along some insights on what the poll told, here is their response;
eBooks has to date been all ranch, no cattle. That’s about to change; here’s why:
Amazon and others are about to deliver a dizzying array of e-titles of all types. Sure, there’s still the format issue (Sony Reader unwisely landlocks users with their BBeB format) but this will wash out fast, because the revenue opportunity is vast. Never underestimate America’s slavish love of speed and convenience; our survey of 5,000 Netizens shows that a big reason eBooks is at the inflection point is because readers want what they want instantaneously.
In response to our Shakespeare Actors Wanted request, where we are looking for volunteers actors to read the plays of Shakespeare, I had an email from a Peter Pressman who wrote to me about the Speak The Speech project. This is a group of volunteers who are wanting to make Shakespeare more universally accessible by producing audio recordings of all his plays.
The Cybook Gen3 from Bookeen is an ultra-light reading device that uses the E ink® screen technology (VizPlex), giving a paper-like high contrast appearance that is readable even under direct sunlight. As with all E-Ink devices the battery gives a great number of page turns, though the Cybook is a little better than the Sony Reader Digital Book (PRS-505), reaching an impressive 8,000 page turns. The Cybook also reads many different file formats, including the MobiPocket format, and offers access to a wide range of digital documents. In the future the Cybook will also have a firmware upgrade to allow EPUB files to be read.
This is a fantastic feat for LibriVox who do great work on producing public domain audio recordings, much of which gets passed to the Project Gutenberg archives. Congratulations to everyone involved!
Project Gutenberg recently received an email from MarketIntellNow, a Maryland-based, six-year old market research firm that focuses on nascent niches. They do a lot of polling using a methodology called “ANWO”, they then blog about the results at a high level (for free) while selling the resulting report in their eStore.
In response to our 
The Cybook Gen3 from Bookeen is an ultra-light reading device that uses the E ink® screen technology (
This is a fantastic feat for