Hardware decisions can also be intensely personal. The Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle, for example, employ power-saving LCD screens that help stretch out the time between battery charges.
But these dedicated readers compete with cell phones and computers that have brighter full-color displays illuminated by backlighting. The batteries may not last as long, but the screens can refresh much faster, allowing programmers to add animated visual gimmicks like simulated page-flipping.
Andrew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon, said the company did not expect customers to do all of their reading on the Kindle.
“Our plan is to make the Kindle books available on many different devices and platforms,” he said. The company distributes a Kindle reader for the iPhone, for example.
Some companies are pursuing broader markets. Wattpad.com, which describes itself as a “community for publishing, reading and sharing” e-books, says its reader software works on hundreds of phone models. That has helped the company expand even in places like Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines, said Allen Lau, a co-founder of Wattpad.
“In those countries,” Lau said, “people are generally poorer and some of the operators don’t subsidize the phone. For them to spend a month or two of salaries to buy an iPhone, it doesn’t make sense.”
Wattpad allows e-books to be read on small, low-end phones that can display just a few lines of text at a time. Yet even in affluent tech-savvy countries like Japan, smaller devices are gaining in popularity because they are easier to carry around.
Lau said people were even writing entire novels on their cell phone, novels that might be 300 pages long as a paper book.
“I don’t know how they do it,” Lau said, “but they manage to do it.”
Writing the book itself is just the beginning. Nick Cave, a rock musician and sometime author, used an iPhone to write one chapter of his second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro. He and his longtime musical collaborator, Warren Ellis, then developed an original score for the book.
If more authors follow suit, readers will soon be fretting about the quality of their earphones, too.
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