Goodreads has quietly grown into one of the most prolific social networks for book readers.
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Though they are an improvement on a computer screen, e-book readers remain crude simulacra of books.
Many have predicted the eventual demise of physical books, as e-book readers and e-book demand soars.
Currently there are about 20 dedicated e-book readers on sale or in development.
And so, the disposability of electronic media is actually something that makes book people sad, but book readers happy.
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The bookstore giant is losing market share to Amazon's online sales and to e-book readers such as Amazon's Kindle.
Like many of the e-book readers that followed, it used e-ink - an innovation developed by a US company of the same name.
Heavy book readers like me aligned with them entirely, gleefully enjoying the destruction they wrought on big chain and small local bookstore alike.
The study also found that 89% of book readers of all ages had read a printed book and 30% had read an ebook.
You can see the logic: the company jumped into hardware with the Kindle e-book readers and then moved into tablets with the Kindle Fire.
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Peruvemba expects flexible plastic displays to get larger in coming years, to the point that they can be used in e-book readers and laptop computers.
The key suppliers of digital e-book readers have been cagey about revealing how many devices they have manufactured and how many they have actually sold.
According to recently released Accenture research, tablets are growing faster than e-book readers, Blu-Ray players, mobile phones, smart phones, netbooks or any other gizmos on the market.
Among other factors, Squali is bullish on the Kindle: he estimates that the company sold 4 million of the e-book readers in Q4, with production of 5 million units.
And tablet computers, GPS navigation devices and e-book readers.
Kobo chose to tailor its tablet to book readers in response to research showing that users who read on dedicated readers consume five times as many books as those who read on tablets.
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One likely consequence: much cheaper electronic book readers.
The OEM business is expected to remain strong for the rest of the year, driven by new product cycles from manufacturers of smartphones, tablets, e-book readers and other mobile Internet devices that use flash-based storage solutions.
Some 500 people have been given electronic-book readers, a gadget the size of a paperback with a screen like that of a laptop computer and a slot to take a memory card that can store three or four novels.
More than 20 million flexible plastic displays are on the market today, according to Sriram Peruvemba, vice-president of marketing for E Ink, the company that developed the low-power display technology for the Amazon Kindle and many other e-book readers.
However, like the others in this prolific writing team - colourist Jamie Grant and story writer Grant Morrison - he is unwilling to put his finger on just what it is about their output which holds such appeal for US comic book readers.
That's a powerful incentive to settle, even when the claims are unlikely to stand up in court, as with Myers' attempt to establish a class of book readers who suffered the same loss from reading a book they later found out wasn't entirely true.
"While book sales usually peak in the run up to Christmas, the move by consumers to use traditional book retailers simply for window shopping before purchasing online at discount prices has seriously impacted this sector, which has already suffered considerably from the growing popularity of e-book readers, " she said.
We've already told you about Orizon from Bookeen, the RCA Lexi, iriver Story, the Jinke SiPix readers, Hanvon WISEreader, the Cool-er readers from Interead, the Ocean and Tidal series from Copia, and a pair of E6 and E10 e-book readers from industry heavyweight Samsung.
Still, this is not a book for readers with a low tolerance for long digressions.
Tom Blair has written what is an essential book that readers will very much enjoy.
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Yet for all the damage done by the content of his book, readers were exasperated most by the style.
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Halfway through the book many readers will feel they have read quite enough reverential descriptions of naturist and pagan cults in 1930s Britain.
In addition, they depend on an array of specialty devices, such as audio book-readers, color readers, navigation tools, raised Braille labels, special bar-code scanners, and large-buttoned, voice-enabled MP3 players which are prohibitively expensive.
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