E-book concept is rekindled

Amazon has stepped up to the challenge of developing an electronic replacement for the humble book but will it succeed where so many others have tried and failed – and what are the marine prospects?

As maritime broadband finally comes of age, with the arrival of high speed VSAT solutions and the recent launch of Inmarsat’s new FleetBroadband service, minds are focussing on how this technology will revolutionise life at sea. Besides the possibilities it opens up for making the business of operating ships more efficient, a benefit regularly espoused by service providers is improved crew welfare.

Certainly, crews will appreciate the ability to communicate with their friends and family more cheaply and easily than ever before but what then? Recreational web-surfing may help kill a couple of hours, but – as many readers will surely agree – it can become tedious and tiring on the eyes. For physiological reasons, reading from a screen requires more concentration than reading from paper.

Companies including Microsoft and Sony have tried for years to develop so-called e-books. It sounds simple, but to date they have enjoyed only modest success in persuading book buyers to abandon the printed page. However, as this issue of MEC was going to press, the world’s largest web retailer, Amazon, announced it was stepping into the fray with the launch of an electronic device that it hopes will succeed where others have failed.

The Kindle is a portable reader that downloads wirelessly books, blogs, magazines and newspapers to a “crisp, high-resolution electronic paper display that looks and reads like real paper.” The company adds that the display is even viewable in bright sunlight.

This has been achieved by replacing pixels with ‘electronic ink’. The on-screen image is created by electronically switching individual ink particles on and off. It reflects light like ordinary paper and does not require a backlight, thereby eliminating the eyestrain and glare associated with conventional PC monitors or LCD screens on handheld devices.

The Internet bookseller has been working on Kindle for more than three years. “Books have stubbornly resisted digitisation. I think there is a very good reason for that, and that is the book is so highly evolved and so suited to its task that it is very hard to displace,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and chief executive officer.

He goes on: “The key feature of a book is that it disappears as we read it. We do not think about the ink, the paper, the glue or the stitching, all those things go away. What remains is the author’s world, the author’s words... Thus our top design objective was for Kindle to ‘disappear in your hands’ so you can enjoy your reading.”

One reason why previous attempts at realising e-books have failed to deliver is that – unlike real books – they were complicated to use and have invariably depended on a PC being available. Software had to be installed, products had to be purchased and downloaded through the web, and the content then had to be synchronised by connecting the device with a USB cable.

“We did not think that was a very user-friendly solution, so we decided there would be no PC and no software to install. The store is accessed from the device, and the content is delivered wirelessly,” explains Mr Bezos. “But even wi-fi can be a challenge for many users, so we opted for EV-DO as used on advanced mobile phones.”

EV-DO is an evolved 3G data standard that uses multiplexing techniques such as code division multiple access (CDMA) as well as frequency division duplex (FDD) to maximise the amount of data transmitted. It is standardised by 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2) as part of the CDMA2000 family of standards and has been adopted by many mobile phone service providers around the world – particularly those previously employing CDMA networks, as opposed to GSM networks.

EV-DO does, however, present its own problems – namely data plans, a contract and a monthly bill. To overcome these, Amazon built its own network, called Whispernet, on top of the EV-DO network deployed by US cellular provider, Sprint. Amazon pays for the connectivity thus saving users from having to sign up to a wireless service.

On its launch, 90,000 books were available for the Kindle device, with a typical bestseller costing US$10 and taking around one minute to download. Users can also sign up for newspapers (primarily US-based titles at present), such as New York Times or Washington Post, to be delivered automatically while they sleep.

Whether Kindle is quite suited or ready for the marine market is difficult to judge. The technology for setting up mobile networks on ships is only just beginning to be available, and most solutions are based on GSM rather than the more advanced CDMA-based EV-DO standard.

There is also the question of internationalisation. For the time being the product is aimed at the English-speaking North American market. With many seafarers today originating from the Philippines or China, content will need to be available in Tagalog and Mandarin, not to mention Polish and Russian for East European crews. For all them, reading in English would probably cause much bigger headaches than the eyestrain caused by reading off a screen. MEC