Delft, December 17, 2007- Starting today, readers and authors can visit www.ereaders.nl, a Netherlands-based website that focuses on the sale of eBook readers, supplemented with news, reviews, links and a forum. In addition, authors can upload their own eBooks and sell them to others. ereaders.nl has been set up by publishers, with the intention to give a new impulse to Gutenberg’s heritage.
"For many years people have been talking about the eBook as the successor to ordinary books. Yet we continue printing and consuming paper in ever-increasing volumes. People do not like to read from a computer screen. But with the development of electronic paper, there is finally a generation eBook readers that offer the readability of plain paper,” says Wiebe de Jager, founder of ereaders.nl.
Some eBook readers offer many more options than just reading, allowing users to scribble notes in digital documents and retrieving wirelessly the latest news. For students, eBook readers are a blessing, since all textbooks, syllabi and college notes fit into a single device. Readers with visual impairments can enlarge the font size. And there are many potential applications for business and government.
De Jager is a publisher at Eburon Academic Publishers. "We see that eBooks take a marginal position in the Dutch book business. Many publishers, booksellers and authors become sceptical when it comes to digital reading. But you only have to look at the music industry’s recent history to see where this ‘wait and see’ attitude may lead to.”
ereaders.nl is designed with the idea in mind that publishers will only make electronic content available if there are customers who can deal with that content. De Jager: “In that case, publishing companies need to create their own market. We assume that there is a group of consumers who will embrace this technology, even though the latest Harry Potter is not yet available as eBook. But that is only a matter of time. And innovative authors can upload and sell their own eBooks at our website, without the need for a publisher.”
De Jager adds, "We want to offer more than just a web shop. We want to involve our customers to see how we can shape the future of the eBook. Hence the subtitle of the website: for and by eBook readers.”
