More E-Reader News

I keep talking about e-readers (even though I don’t have one, unless you count my iPhone). That's because things keep happening. We talked about Amazon and their e-reader, the Kindle, and Barnes & Noble's new eReader and then the Apple reading tablet and Google’s building of a digital book ecosystem. Most of us seemed to agree it would be really helpful if books could be made available on all these competing systems so you could download any book to whatever type reader you had.

There’s hope on the horizon.

Yesterday, I read an article about LibreDigital, which started up in 1999 with $70 million in venture capital as NewsStand to provide digital copies of newspapers. In 2006, it relaunched itself with $7 million from Harper-Collins Publishers and other investors to focus on the electronic book publishing market.

According to the Austin American-Statesman article,

LibreDigital will use the new investment to further the development of its technology, which lets publishers deliver content to readers across a range of platforms, from electronic book readers to digital phones.

It’s still delivering digital newspapers, but is now also working with six of the top 10 publishers, including HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group and Simon & Schuster.

LibreDigital CEO Russell Reeder said "knitting together traditional and new content sources with the various mobile devices consumers use can be daunting for any publisher. We're making the entire process seamless, no matter what device or content source publishers need to feed."

According to the article, chairman of LibreDigital says,

the market for e-books and electronic editions of newspapers is projected to exceed $2 billion by 2012.

So companies are starting to jump into this field of making books available across different platforms. There’s hope that what readers and authors want to happen is in the works.