By | No Comments
Last updated: Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Adam Parks is an avid reader of digital books. But you won’t find him downloading the 20 or so titles he reads each year onto an electronic book device like Amazon’s Kindle. Instead, Parks flips through pages — Web-site design manuals and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War are recent favorites — on his trusted iPhone. Parks is one of a growing number of people getting their book fix via mobile phone, a method he considers more convenient than using a dedicated e-book reader like the Kindle or Sony’s Reader Digital Book. “I travel a lot in Asia and in the U.S.,” says Parks, a marketing executive who resides in Palm Beach, Fla. “If you are running from airport to airport and from city to city, bringing an extra piece of equipment loses some of its value.” Owning a Kindle appears to hold plenty of value for the consumers who are snapping up the devices so fast that it’s been sold out since November. Yet the idea of downloading a book onto a device you already own may appeal to cash-strapped and space-constrained consumers. Downloading Royalty-Free Books And as smartphones have become more ubiquitous, in part thanks to the popularity of Apple’s iPhone, so have the tools that make it easy for users to download a book for a fraction of the cost of buying one elsewhere. Users of the iPhone and its cousin, the iPod touch, have downloaded William Shakespeare’s collected works more than 300,000 times from the Apple iTunes App Store, according to Readdle, the Ukraine-based startup that created the free application that makes the download possible. The books section in the Apple iTunes App Store lists about 700 titles; Apple separately offers 72 audio books. It’s hard to beat the price of a smartphone book. While new titles like Twilight may cost…

Read the rest here:
Move Over Kindle — E-Books Hit Cell Phones

CommentSubscribe