Our platform focus continues this fine Sunday with the e-Book Echo, our take on the week in the digital publishing world. Plastic Logic is set to spring the Que reader early next year, and they set out from the beginning to focus on magazine content to set them apart from the crowd. They have announced deals to feature content with various publishers. So far they are going to feature the following magazines, available directly through their online store after launch: Popular Science, PC World, Macworld, CIO, Network World, Computerworld, Technology Review, Financial Times, USA TODAY, Detroit Free Press, and Detroit News. The Que is being positioned by the company as a “business reader”, with its native support of the PDF format for viewing business documents.
Savvy e-book enthusiasts are keenly aware of the ability to read e-books on mobile phones, no special reader required. Some have trouble reading books on the small screen of the phone, however, and that difficulty could be a result of improper settings of the display. Novelist Jeff Kirvin is a big fan of reading books on the phone, and his article How to Read a Book on Your Phone is a must-read for those wanting to maximize the pleasure of doing so. Jeff covers the basic settings of typefaces, margin width and screen brightness, and explains why each setting has an impact on the reading experience. If you have tried to read e-books on phones in the past but found it less than enjoyable, you may want to give Jeff’s recommendations a try. Maybe you won’t need one of those fancy e-book readers after all.
ABC News has produced a list of the Top 10 Gadgets of the Decade, and the e-book reader makes the list. I’m not sure I agree that readers have reached their potential yet, but ABC makes a compelling argument as to why they find them worthy of being on the list:
Bye bye, books? Maybe not quite yet, but as e-readers, such as Sony’s Reader and Amazon’s Kindle, gain in popularity, printed novels, textbooks and even newspapers and magazines are slowly retreating into the background.

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