Will E-Books Orders Finally Take Off In 2009?

After a sluggish start over a decade, sales of e-books have gained significant momentum during past one year, primarily owing to Amazon.com's wireless e-book device "Kindle".

Launched about a year back, the device is extremely easy to carry, and is widely being responsible for popularizing e-books over the past one year; Moreover, the price tag of the device is $359, and it is currently out of stock for up to February.

This shortage of Kindle in market would allow Sony to explore the opportunities in e-book device market, especially when the Christmas season is at its peak.

Quoting the remarkable growth in e-book space, Steve Haber, Sony's digital reading division president, said in a statement, "The perception is that e-books have been around for 10 years and haven't done anything. But it's happening now. This is really starting to take off"

Meanwhile, inspired by the phenomenal success of Amazon's Kindle, Apple Inc., in conjunction with Scroll Motion, has launched an e-book reader application, dubbed as "Iceberg", for its iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

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The application is offering titles from some of the prominent publishing houses, including Penguin, Mifflin Harcourt, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Houghton, and Random House.

Touted to offer an experience closer to reading a book, the new application allows iPhone and iPod Touch users to 'flip the page with swipe of a finger', along with text scrolling, shrinking, and expanding capabilities.

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