And unlike the Kindle, which shipped to Australian buyers almost a year before New Zealand customers got it, the Sony range has been absent from both markets until now. It’s a delay that will cost Sony some momentum but it’s certainly good news for the Kobo-powered ebook stores on both sides of the Tasman (Whitcoulls in New Zealand, Borders and Angus & Roberston in Oz).

Sony’s offering provides a premium brand name reader that will be tuned for easy access to these Kobo-powered ebook stores. Sony has been an early champion of the book industry’s open ePub ebook format in contrast to Amazon with its proprietary Kindle format.

Sony will release two of its units, the Sony Reader Touch Edition which sports the same 6-inch diagonal eInk  screen as the Kobo and Kindle, and the smaller Pocket Edition with a 5-inch screen. Both editions have a touch screen which many people prefer for navigation though usually at the slight expense of lower contrast.

Neither Sony model sports wireless, either via WiFi or 3G, so like the Kobo will need to be connected to a PC to load up on ebooks. Sony does have such a model, the Daily Edition, a slightly larger 7-inch model with both WiFi and 3G (cellular) wireless access but there are no plans at this stage for it to come to New Zealand.

The Pocket Edition will be NZ$299 and the Sony Reader Touch Edition will be NZ$399. NBR has a good comparison table showing how Sony’s line-up will compare with the new Kindle and Whitcoulls’ Kobo eReader.

And here’s a video intro from Sony New Zealand.

Vodafone—the accused-but- never-admitted cause of the hold-up—will be the mobile carrier, providing local 3G support for Amazon’s Whispernet system by which Kindle books can be delivered wirelessly over the cellular network with the communications cost built into the price of the ebook. As well as downloading ebooks wirelessly, Whispernet is a boon if you’re reading on multiple devices as many of us do. It synchronises gadgets so that when you later fire up your book on your iPhone, for instance, it will take you to the last page read. This is a major time saver, especially on slower eInk devices.

New York Times bestsellers are mostly US$11.99 (no NZD pricing but it equates to about NZ$17). This indicates an international download charge of about US$2.00 a book added to the typical US domestic price of US$9.99 for the same bestsellers. That’s still pretty good value and, of course, ebooks from Amazon currently escape the 12.5% (soon to be 15%) sales tax levied here, a tough reality for local booksellers who must charge it.

Notwithstanding the benefits of 3G, especially with no monthly charges, I’d guess most New Zealand buyers will opt for the new US$139 WiFi model rather than the more expensive US$189 3G + WiFi model.  At about NZ$200 plus NZ$30 freight, the WiFi model is cheaper than the $295 Kobo unit sold by local bookstore chain Whitcoulls. That gap might narrow if buyers are hit with sales tax at the border but the Kindle’s low value makes it likely it will slip through Customs without a whisper.

More here from NBR’s Chris Keall who also promises a review shortly.

And according to this NBR story, the Kindle will finally ship to New Zealand with the new device’s release. We’ve been mysteriously Kindle-free for almost a year since Kindle’s widespread international release.

The Kindle ebooks have been available to New Zealand buyers since late last year. I’ve been a regular buyer via my iPod Touch and now iPad.

The new Kindle is 21 percent smaller and 15 percent lighter than the previous model. It has a 20 percent faster refresh rate on its E Ink screen, longer battery life (1 month without wireless, 10 days with wireless on), and a larger 4GB storage. It comes in white and a slate grey. Endgadget briefly got their hands on the gadget and report that:

… the Kindle is still very much the reading device you know and love (or hate, depending on your preferences). The build quality and materials used did seem slightly more polished than the previous version, and we really liked the new, more subtle rocker. We can also attest to screen refreshes and overall navigation feeling noticeably more responsive and snappy compared with the previous generation.

The US$139 price point of the WiFi model might be the final push the market needs to get below the US$100 mark for basic models such as the Kobo or BeBook One. The latter is still a ridiculously expensive A$449 for a non-WiFi e-Ink reader. It’s a perfectly good eReader but it’s hard to see how the smaller independent makers like BeBook can survive when they remain so far out of line with market trends.

Amazon's third generation Kindle

A new usability study by leading usability researcher Jakob Nielsen lined up the printed book against digital editions on the Kindle, iPad and PC. It came up with results that might surprise advocates of the printed book.

After using each device, we asked users to rate their satisfaction on a 1–7 scale, with 7 being the best score.  iPad, Kindle, and the printed book all scored fairly high at 5.8, 5.7, and 5.6, respectively. The PC, however, scored an abysmal 3.6.

The poor showing of the PC was predictable but it’s interesting to see just how well these first-generation e-readers stack up against the printed book. Admittedly, my headline is a slight beat-up: the lead that Kindle and iPad had over print was not statistcally significant. But it’s a strong showing, especially since the reading material being tested was narrative fiction so e-readers would have gained no advantage from digital-specific functions such as search or portability.

In case you think these results might have been biased by a bunch of geeks in the survey sample, it seems the main criteria for selecting participants was that they like reading and frequently read books.

Nielsen’s study did find that electronic readers still can’t match the printed book for reading speed: the iPad was 6.2% slower than the printed boook and the Kindle was 10.7% slower.

Nielsen says the difference between iPad and Kindle reading speeds was not statistically significant but the difference between electronic and print was. However, the e-readers are already close to printed books and will rapidly improve.

And as this blog post from The Digital Reader points out, the results might have been even better if the participants had been experienced e-readers rather than (probably) newbies.

Amazon dropped the price of its Kindle almost 30% to US$189 from US$259. This is less than half the original US$399 price tag when it was launched two and a half years ago. Amazon’s move trumped Barnes and Noble which just a few hours earlier cut its Nook eReader’s price from US$259 to US$199.

These big price cuts from the top sellers mean the gap has narrowed considerably between them and the low cost Kobo Reader. In the US, the Kobo is sold by Borders at US$149. While its no-frills package of essential features looked attractive when the gap was large, it will put pressure on that strategy now. Rather than cutting the Kobo’s price, Borders in the US has offered a US$20 gift card to effectively cut its price to US$129.

No sign at this stage that Australian and New Zealand prices for the Kobo reader will change. In Australia, where both the Kobo and Kindle are available, the Kobo is still A$199. A Kindle including freight will cost A$235 at the current exchange rate, plus GST if any is levied. In New Zealand, the Kindle — frustratingly — remains unavailable so the price drops in the US are mostly academic at this stage. But, if it were available in New Zealand, a Kindle would be about NZ$290 landed. The Kobo is currently NZ$295 incl GST.

While it might be tough on margins, the momentum of the iPad and the push for further price drops for the e-Ink devices is going to be great news for ebook sales.

• Apple’s iBooks
• Amazon Kindle for iPad
• Barnes and Noble eReader
• Kobo Reader (which is also the Borders eReader and will soon be the Whitcoulls eReader for the iPad)
• Ibis Reader (this is interesting because it’s actually an HTML5 web app rather than a native iPad/iPhone app)
• Stanza
• vBookz (actually a text-to-speech reader app rather than a traditional e-reading app)

Among Perlow’s findings:

• Apple’s iBooks is the flashiest but “of all the reader applications we’ve looked at, it is actually the least functional. Apple designed iBooks to behave and act like a real book, and focused more on the aesthetics and UI than actual App functionality with the initial release.”
• Amazon’s Kindle wins in terms of the size of its 600,000-title ebook store but “from a feature perspective, the Kindle software is pretty weak when compared to its hardware counterpart.”
• Interestingly, it’s the Barnes and Noble eReader that wins the highest plaudits from Perlow. “Of all the paid content readers, by far the best one in existence is probably the Barnes & Noble eReader application.” But it’s probably not so useful outside of the US because of its ties to the very US-focused B&N store.
• Of particular interest in this part of the world is the Kobo which will shortly be released in this part of the world as the Whitcoulls reader app. For Perlow, it stacks up pretty well. “It’s extremely polished and very well-designed,” he says.
• The Ibis Reader is different from the others in being written in HTML5. It reads non-DRM ePub files. “Compared to the other reader apps on this list, the reading features within Ibis Reader are pretty spartan. … However, the interface is very clean and simple to use, and the reading experience is actually pretty good when compared to the native apps.”
• Stanza was the original e-reading app that popularised e-reading on the iPhone. It’s the latest to the iPad party but the result is good according to Perlow. “Stanza is by far the most sophisticated e-Reader application for iPad, as it supports not only the open EPUB format but also the legacy Mobipocket, PalmDoc (DOC), Microsoft LIT formats as well as HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word and Rich Text Format (RTF)…. If you have lots of content that you’ve collected over the years, Stanza is definitely a must-have app. There’s absolutely no downside, it’s free to use and does more than any e-book reader app on this list.”
• vBookz is a US$2.99 text-to-speech reader which works only with public domain ebooks  at this stage. Perlow concludes, “vBookz is an extremely interesting and exploitative iPad application, and one which may be good for getting children interested in classic literature and also a useful app for the visually impaired.”

Read the full ZDNet e-reader app review here.

UPDATE: ZDNet has also posted a comparison of ebook reader apps for the Google Android platform. Check it out.

That looks set to change as an influential magazine standards group, the IDEAlliance, has thrown its weight behind the development of the next generation ePub, the standard adopted by book publishers for ebooks.

Speaking at the Magazine Publishers of America’s Dimensional to Digital conference last week, Dianne Kennedy, vice president of Media Technologies at IDEAlliance said her organisation was working with the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) to bring rich media and magazine content to the ePub standard.

IDEAlliance is the group behind PRISM, the XML standard for magazine and journal metadata.

The book industry’s ePub standard is widely supported by device manufacturers, publishers and distributors.  Convergence with the magazine and newspaper industries would make a lot of sense for publishers, consumers and device manufacturers.

While ePub currently lacks some features that are important to magazines, its general approach based on XML and web technologies including HTML and CSS is very sound. Combined with its widespread support among device manufacturers and industry heavyweights Apple and Google, it offers a good foundation for digital magazines.

The standard will also be developed “with an eye to advertising”, says Kennedy, another key feature for magazines.

The working group hopes to have the first draft of a standard published by September 2010.

Among the 14 goals that the IDPF’s working group has identified for the next ePub specification, currently designated ePub 2.1, several are particularly important to magazines:

Need for rich media and interactivity support.

Need for enhanced article support. The fundamental atomic unit of magazines and newspapers is the article … it is desirable to support a work flow where PRISM content can be delivered as EPUB.

Need for a means to convey page-level layouts and target multiple display surface sizes in a single publication.  … This is a barrier to supporting books with more complex information designs, as well as digital magazines …

Currently there is no mechanism to identify and include advertising in publications, which is required in several markets.

For more, see this article from eMedia Vitals.

iOS4 is a free upgrade for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPads. It’s rumoured that another platform will be eventually added to the iOS family when Apple uses it to revamp its unsuccessful Apple TV set-top box.

Of note for publishers:

• Apple is talking up its iBookstore as the third store platform, following the original iTunes and the App Store. It claims that, among the large publishers who’ve supported the iBookstore since launch on 3 April, sales through the iBookstore now represent 22% of their ebook sales.
• The iBooks e-reading app has now been ported to the iPhone and iPod Touch.
• The iBookstore now operates wirelessly, no PC required, and will syncronise your ebooks across multiple Apple devices. This includes your ebook library, the place you’re at in the ebook you’re reading and — a new feature — your bookmarks and annotations.
• iBooks now reads PDFs as well as ePub formatted ebooks. This will make it useful as a reader for business documents as well as adding what is still a popular ebook format and might serve as a useful interim “quick and dirty” format for illustrated books and textbooks.
• On the hardware front, a new iPhone model was announced which will improve the reading experience with a higher resolution, 960 x 640,  327 pixel per inch display and an extended battery life.
• iOS4 will also see the launch on 1 July of Apple’s mobile advertising platform, iAds. iAds will open up a new source of income for app developers, potentially opening advertising to any of the quarter of a million apps. Apple will take 40% and return 60% to developers. In a show of strength, it signed up US$60 million of A-list advertisers to support the launch, a figure Apple claims is half of the entire projected mobile ad spend for the second half of 2010. One neat feature will be the ability to launch web ads from an in-app browser so that the user remains inside the application when viewing the advertiser’s website rather than being taken out of the app to launch the Safari web browser.

Finally, in what is becoming an unfortunate pattern in Apple’s announcements, a revised developer agreement takes aim at potential Apple rivals, locking them out of the App store. This time, Google appears to be the target with its competing mobile ad platform, AdMob. Google beat Apple this week by releasing the SDK (software development kit) for its in-app mobile advertising for the iPhone and iPad. The trouble is, in a move reminiscent of its ban on Adobe’s Flash platform on the eve of the iPad launch, Apple just changed the terms of its developer agreement, making it unlikely that any app developers will be able to incorporate AdMob ads without risking being banned from the App store.

More on the launch: See the Techcrunch summary of key points from the iPhone and iOS4 launch.

The Kobo eReader will be stocked in about 30 of Whitcoulls’ stores as well as being for sale online at whitcoulls.co.nz. It sells for NZ$295 including GST which is a little higher than we’d hoped it would be. In the US, it sells for US$149,in Canada C$149, and it’s A$199 across the Tasman in Australia. But even at $295, it represents very good value compared to other offerings and it’s a price that should encourage a lot of Kiwis to jump on board. The Kindle for instance — still unavailable to New Zealand buyers — retails for US$259 which is about NZ$430 with GST added.

The Kobo/Whitcoulls service is more than an eReader and you don’t actually need this eReader to read the Kobo ebooks. One of Whitcoulls/Kobo’s distinguishing features is its support of the industry standard ePub format along with a wide range of reading devices from PCs and Macs (not recommended for in-depth reading) to iPhones, iPads, Blackberries and Android smartphones.

Whitcoulls launched its iPhone/iPod Touch app (link opens iTunes) today and will shortly roll out support for Blackberries, Android smartphones and, in time for its July New Zealand launch, the iPad.

Despite all this choice, if you can justify the cost, a dedicated ebook reader will add plenty to your ebook reading enjoyment.

Whitcoulls and Kobo have been smart in opting for a basic specification with a good price point rather than loading the the Kobo eReader with lots of expensive features that don’t always add a lot to the reading experience.

Don’t let its budget price fool you. The Kobo is one of the best ebook readers around, functionally, ergonomically and style-wise. It has a quality feel, weighs in at 221 grams making it ideal for one-handed reading. Try doing that for long periods on an Apple iPad.

Its 6-inch/15 cm e-Ink screen operates crisply with nice typography including a choice of a serif and a sans serif typeface plus five type sizes. The black and white e-Ink display gives it a stable paper-like appearance, much easier on the eyes than the more common backlit LCD/LED displays, and offers great readability in natural light conditions, including outside in sunshine. Add a long battery life measured in weeks rather than hours and you’ve got a compelling feature set for comfortable reading.

One of the best usability features of the Kobo eReader is its “D-Pad” (short for “Directional Pad”). It’s a large round button which you press on the right or left edge to turn the pages forward or back. A neat feature is that pressing the D-Pad at the top or bottom will increase or decrease font size. A minor criticism is that the Kobo works best when held with the right hand but is a little less comfortable when held in the left. Many ebook readers solve this with an extra set of page forward/page back buttons on the left.

The tight integration with the Whitcoulls/Kobo ebookstore should make it a good choice for readers who aren’t tech whizzes, something that can’t be said for many of the eReaders out there.

You can download your ebooks to several devices, such as your Kobo eReader and an iPhone. I like to do this and find that having the iPhone or iPod Touch is great for catching those few extra minutes here and there during the day when you have a spare moment to read. Once you’ve set up a Whitcoulls’ online ebook account, your ebook collection is stored in “the cloud” (that is, on the internet) so they’re accessible from anywhere at any time, and from several devices.

The Kobo eReader boots up to a home screen which shows your latest downloaded titles and the titles you’re reading currently. If you get lost, pressing the “Home” button on the left-hand edge will always get you back to this point. You can organise your ebook collection by title, author, or most recently read, and they are added to an alphabetical tabbed section which is great for organising a large collection. The Kobo comes pre-loaded with 100 classics (none yet from New Zealand, alas).

Unlike the Kindle and several other eReaders, the Kobo does not have a wireless connection (other than Bluetooth which you can use to connect to a Blackberry). To buy and download ebooks, you’ll need a PC or Mac connected to the internet, basically the same system that Apple uses with iPods and the iTunes store. The ebooks are then copied to the Kobo reader which connects via a normal USB cable (supplied).

You can add an SD memory card up to 4GB which, along with the Kobo’s 1GB of onboard storage, gives you heaps of room for a thousand or more ebooks. Apart from ePub, the only other format supported at the moment is PDF but Kobo promises more will be added by way of software upgrade in future. This means you’ll need to convert your business documents to PDF to read on the Kobo.

So what’s missing from the Kobo eReader? The main thing of value is wireless connectivity, something that has been a winner for the Kindle. But frankly, given how easy the Kobo is to get ebooks on to, it’s a nice-but-not-necessary accessory. Another feature some eReaders offer is a touch screen, again nice but not necessary: I’ll take the saving (and crisper screen). Then there’s colour. The Kobo, like all of today’s e-Ink displays, is black and white but so are most of the ebooks you can buy today. Finally, if you’re looking for a device that will surf the net and do your email as well as read books, you’re better to wait a couple of months for Apple’s iPad, albeit at almost three times the price.

But if you want a gadget that — a bit like the book itself — does one thing really, really well and won’t break the bank, the wait is over. The Kobo eReader, and the flexibility the Kobo system offers to read your ebooks on several devices, is a great way to take your first step into the world of ebooks.

[I've posted a video review and demo of the Kobo reader on bookTV.nz. If you haven't already done it, head over to booktv.co.nz and sign up to follow us via Twitter, RSS, Facebook or good old email. Lots of good stuff coming.]

Whitcoulls’ ebook store carries the ‘Whitcoulls’ brand but is powered by Kobo and integrated into Whitcoulls’ existing online bookstore. It follows the launch last week of a similar service by Red Group’s Australian chain Angus and Robertson.

Whitcoulls says it has two million ebooks at launch though most of these are free classics. The Kobo connection, though, brings a very credible offering of a couple of hundred thousand commercial ebooks including, finally, some New Zealand titles. The New Zealand list is still pretty thin (I’ve got my eye on Mr Pip, $19.95 in ebook format compared to $34.95 for the New Zealand paperback edition), but Whitcoulls is committed to working with local publishers to get the New Zealand list boosted as fast as possible.

Prices were surprisingly good with a big selection of ebook titles between about $12 and $20.

Remember when you’re making international comparisons that it’s not just the exchange rate to factor in — Whitcoulls, as a New Zealand-domiciled retailer, has to charge the 12.5% (shortly 15%) Goods and Services Tax, an impost that Amazon and other international sites avoid.

Along with the ebook store, Whitcoulls has also launched the Kobo dedicated ebook reader, giving Kiwis their first retail experience of an e-Ink ebook reader. You don’t actually need this to read the Kobo ebooks though it will be nice to have: one of Whitcoulls’/Kobo’s distinguishing features is its support of a wide range of reading devices from PCs and Macs to iPhones, iPads, Blackberries and Android smartphones.  The Kobo eReader will be stocked in about 30 of Whitcoulls’ stores and sells for NZ$295 including GST.

You can read my review of the Kobo ebook reader. I’ll also be posting a video review and demonstration of the Kobo reader on bookTV.nz and will post it here once it’s online.