The areas where FastPencil exceeds are online editing, collaboration and distribution. Fast Pencil offers a surprisingly comprehensive online editing suite. While this editor isn't quite as fully-featured as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or Apple's Pages - there is no feature to create headlines or tables of content, for example - it's more than enough to power the service's online collaboration tools.

In it's latest update, which launched earlier this week, FastPencil introduced a number of interesting new features. These include new templates, new roles for collaborators (co-authors, project managers) and forums for prospective authors to meet and discuss their work.

Turn Your Blog Into a Book

If you import your blog feed, FastPencil will turn every blog post into a chapter. The service also imports images from these posts. These images have to be inserted at the beginning or end of a post, however. You can't have your text flow around an image.

Publishing: Hardcover, Paperback, E-Book

Once you have finished your book, you can publish it as an e-book and printed book. These services, however, do cost. These paid services include printing, obtaining ISBN numbers, and organizing the distribution of your book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram Digital and other retail partners. FastPencil also offers a number of editing services like design, illustration and editing services. Besides printing hardcover and paperback books, FastPencil can format books for virtually any digital platform, including DRM-free ePub e-books and the Kindle.

Don't Need All These Services? Try SmashWords

If you don't need all of these services from Fast Pencil - or if you have already finished your book - another service worth looking at is SmashWords. Smashwords specializes in e-books. Thanks to deals with Barnes & Noble and Sony in the US and Indigo Books & Music's Shortcovers in Canada, self-published authors can get their e-books into traditional distribution channels, or sell their books directly on SmashWords. Smashwords acquired the New Zealand-based e-book self-publishing service BookHabit earlier this week.

This new organization within Adobe will bring together the e-book business groups that worked on the Adobe Reader Mobile SDK, Adobe Content Server, Adobe Digital Editions, as well as the group that worked with the New York Times on the Times Reader 2.0. The new group will focus on developing products and business opportunities for digital publishers. These will include support for business models like subscription, advertising and retail.

Sony, for example, currently uses Adobe's Content Server to power its DRM solution for e-books. While Sony offers its e-books in the ePub format, it also uses Adobe's Content Server to wrap a proprietary DRM solution around the open ePub format.

Bill McCoy is Leaving Adobe

Bill McCoy drove Adobe's push towards making ePub the default format for eBooks. McCoy, however, is leaving Adobe as part of the restructuring. We can only hope that the company will continue to push for open standards in McCoy's absence. More details about McCoy's role at Adobe can be found at TeleRead.

The application itself is pretty sparse, with just a few buttons for sorting books and switching between downloaded and archived books. Amazon did not integrate the Kindle store into the application, though a prominent link in the app opens up the Kindle store in the browser. This comes as a surprise, given how easy it would be to integrate the store. While reading books, users can adjust the size of the font and bookmark a page. The app can display notes and highlights that were created on a Kindle or in the Kindle for iPhone app.

In designing the app, Amazon clearly had touchscreen and netbook users in mind. All the buttons in the app are large and the left and right edges of the application can be clicked - or tapped - to move between pages. To advance a page, users can also use their cursor keys or mouse wheel.

Users of the Windows application can not add notes or highlights to a book right now, though the company plans to add the ability to create notes and highlights in the application in the future. Amazon is also considering to add a search feature, as well as the ability zoom and rotate images. Another feature that is currently missing but that netbook users would likely appreciate is a full-screen mode.

Kindle Everywhere

Overall, the app is easy to use and works as advertised. The lack of a built-in store and the ability to add notes and highlights is a slight disappointment, though. Sony, Barnes & Noble and others offer desktop e-readers for OSX and Windows with more features. Amazon decided to keep the application as simple as possible.

For Amazon, this is an important move, as it gives the company access to a wider market. While Amazon has sold millions of Kindles, the PC market is still far bigger and the popularity of netbooks could also give the app a boost. Reading a book on a PC or laptop is not as comfortable as on a hardware e-reader with an e-ink display, but the free desktop application will allow users to sample e-books and get accustomed to the process before buying an e-reader.

The desktop application will also give Amazon a presence on all the big platforms - so while other devices may be more open than the Kindle, this argument against the Kindle becomes less potent as Kindle users can now read their books virtually everywhere anyway.

More Than Just Static Text

Over time, e-books on the iPhone will hopefully become more interesting than the current crop of apps. While today's hardware e-readers mimic traditional books, the next generation of e-readers will likely go beyond this and the iPhone is already in a position to lead the charge. Creative's forthcoming Zii MediaBook will offer some of this functionality. With iTunes LP, Apple also has a format that publishers could use to create richer e-book experiences. iTunes LPs aren't compatible with the iPhone and iPod touch, yet. It is likely only a matter of time before Apple brings this format to its mobile devices, though.

The project's lofty goal is to essentially create an open web of books where anyone can publish their books and make their content available via search.

Although still in the early days of development and potentially taking years to complete, the BookServer project will allow search engines to index books from all over the web. What that means for an end user is that you could type a title into a search engine and the engine would return results listing everywhere you could get that book in digital format including online bookstores, libraries, or a direct method from the publisher itself. Depending on your needs, you could borrow the book or purchase it and then download it to your digital device.

While the project isn't exactly a direct effort to take down Amazon's online bookstore or Google's upcoming online eBook store called Google Editions, it will provider book publishers and online libraries with the means to more effectively compete with those companies. By allowing publishers to set their own pricing and manage the distribution of their books, they will be able to take back control from Amazon and Google who would rather dictate those terms for them.

An Open Marketplace for eBooks

A secondary goal of BookServer's open system is to fight back against the proprietary marketplaces, such as Amazon's Kindle Store, where books are only sold in a copyright-protected format (.AZW) that only works on the company's eReader device, the Kindle. Elsewhere, some book sellers use other proprietary formats, others use the open ePub format, and still others distribute books as Adobe PDFs. For consumers, this multitude of choices only leads to confusion. People don't know what formats their particular device can read or where to get them. It brings to mind the similar issues consumers have had with digitally distributed music. To this day, many are still confused about whether their iTunes purchased music can play on other devices or whether tunes purchased from other online MP3 stores will play on their iPods.

While Google promises its Google Editions store will allow anyone to access digital books as long as they have a web browser and internet access, it's still unknown at this time how the company plans to make the digital content available offline. Will it require the use of special web browser plugins to do so? Until Google reveals more about the technical details, it is not possible to know how truly open their online store will be. And even if their store is 100% open, they are still a company whose ultimate goal is to profit from their work of digitizing books. BookServer's goal, on the other hand, is to provide universal access to book data made available in open formats.

Today, a few booksellers have partnered with the BookServer system including Feedbooks, O'Reilly, Adobe, and the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project.

According to news coming out of the Book Fair event, the new digital books program will launch in the first half of 2010 and will offer 400,000 to 600,000 ebooks at that time.

Although we already knew that the online store would host books in the cloud, we didn't know just how that would work. Tom Turvey, Google's director of strategic partnerships, now explains that the device does not need to be connected to the Internet to read the book after it was accessed once. He also clarified that the company is "not focused on a dedicated eReader or device of any kind." Instead, consumers would go online one time from their device of choice and afterwards, a cached version of that book would be stored so that it could be read offline at anytime. "As long as you can get onto the library, you can access it," says Amanda Edmonds, Google's director of strategic partnerships, who was speaking at O'Reilly's Tools of Change conference, also being held in Frankfurt at a venue near the Book Fair event.

Although not specified, it seems probable that the offline caching done by Google Editions will be made possible via Google Gears, a browser extension that allows website content to be taken offline and then re-synced when an Internet connection returns.

Business Models

As noted on The Bookseller, a site covering the Tools of Change conference, Google Editions will offer three business models. The first will allow a consumer to purchase the ebook from Google Books, Google's online collection of digitized books. The second will allow consumers to purchase from a partner retailer and the third would direct consumers to a publisher's website. In the first route, payments are split 63/37 in the publisher's favor. If purchasing from a retailer, that split would be 45/55 with the 45% going to the publisher and the retailer splitting the remaining 55% with Google. No decision has been made on the split for the third option, purchases made via a publisher's own website. Edmonds also noted that these splits are not set in stone just yet - discussions were "just beginning." In addition, Google may discount books from their list price where permitted, but the discount would be taken from Google's profits and not anyone else's.

Other news from the O'Reilly event pinned down the launch date of the Google Editions store. It will launch simultaneously in the U.S., U.K., and Europe in June 2010.

Google would not give the names of the device manufacturers they intend on partnering with, but Edmonds says she doubts Kindle will be one of them.

One of the main reasons why Forrester is correcting its forecast is the fact that prices have come down (and this report was actually written before the Amazon announcement). In addition, Forrester also sees increased consumer awareness thanks to the current media buzz around eReaders. While the Kindle was mentioned 8,680 times in news stories in 2008, it has been mentioned over 15,700 times in 2009 already (including the month of September). In addition, the fact that more content is now available and that manufacturers like iRex and Sony are backing the open ePub standard is also opening up the market to buyers who previously weren't interested in Amazon's closed Kindle ecosystem.

Outlook for 2010: Even Better

For next year, Forrester expects that Barnes & Noble will become serious competition for Amazon. With the iRex Digital Reader 800 and the forthcoming Plastic Logic reader, B&N will be able to offer its customers a lineup of eReaders that can easily challenge Amazon's Kindle - though not in the international market that Amazon just entered yesterday.

Forrester also expects that Apple's mythical tablet could become a major force in the eReader market, though for the time being, the Apple tablet is obviously nothing more than a rumor.

Clearly the eReader market is growing at a rapid pace. Just yesterday, when Amazon unveiled the reduced prices for its Kindle 2 and the launch of the AT&T-powered "U.S. & International Wireless" version of the Kindle 2, Amazon's CEO and founder Jeff Bezoz pointed out in an interview with the New York Times that whenever Amazon offers both a Kindle and paper version of a book, 48% of total sales now come from the digital Kindle edition. In May, this number was 35%. While Amazon doesn't release sales numbers for the Kindle, these numbers are only possible if Amazon has sold a lot more Kindles than most analysts previously thought.

For now, B&N only advertises its iPhone, BlackBerry, and PC/Mac software readers on its site, but the company doesn't offer any compatible hardware readers just yet. Since the launch of the eBook store, B&N has announced a partnership with iRex and we are still waiting for the mythical Plastic Logic eReader to appear.

A spike in interest right after the launch of a new product is obviously nothing unusual, but this data shows that B&N could challenge the Kindle in the long run. To do so, however, B&N needs to offer users a clear alternative to Amazon's Kindle. Sony, which offers numerous eReaders that are connected to its eBook store, is obviously also trying to make a major push in the eBook market and while its numbers are slowly trending up, Amazon and the Kindle remain in a clear lead. As Compete's McGovern points out, B&N has shown that it can easily drive its customers to its eBook store - thanks, in no small part, to a very successful email campaign - but it will need to offer a hardware eReader to really take on Amazon.

As Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps point out, iRex has to overcome some challenges because its brand is relatively unknown in the US. According to the New York Times, iRex wanted to release a Barnes & Noble branded version of the DR800SG, but those negotiations apparently didn't go very far. At the same time, though, iRex also has some advantages, especially in Europe - a market that other vendors have mostly ignored for now.

At this point, however, it's not even really about the launch of yet another eReader anymore - with Amazon, Sony, Asus, iRex, Plastic Logic, Coolreaders, and a growing number of other contenders, the market is now wide open and competition is already bringing prices down. Prices now start at $149 for refurbished 1st generation Kindles and go up to $489 for the Kindle DX, with Amazon's competitors hitting every price point in between. For most consumers, any price over $99 is still too high for an eReader, but then, hardware prices always come down sooner or later and it is only a matter of time before somebody is going to release a decent $99 eReader.

At $399, the new iRex reader is obviously one of the more expensive readers on the market right now, though its price is in line with competing wireless eReaders like the Sony Reader Daily Edition. Sony, however, offers a real touchscreen on some of its high-end readers though, something iRex has disavowed for now because it reduces the contrast of the screen.

Getting eReaders Into the Marketplace

Another important aspect of this announcement is that Best Buy will now set apart some space in its stores to feature eReaders. Until now, Best Buy only sold eReader on its website. Even though public interest in eReaders is high, only a relatively small number of people have actually held one of these devices in their hands.

For now, this new feature is only available in the United States, though according to a blog post on the Google Book Search blog, the company plans to make this feature "available elsewhere in the future."

For now, these printers are only available in a about a dozen locations, including the University of Michigan Shapiro Library in Ann Arbor, MI, and the Bibliotheca Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt. The Harvard Book Store will also soon get one of these machines as well. By early 2010, On Demand Books hopes to have sold about 35 to 40 machines and this new deal with Google will surely help the company to reach this goal.

It's good to see that Google acknowledges that not everybody wants to read everything on a screen. While you could always just print out the PDF versions of the public domain books on your own printer, the Espresso machine can quickly print library-quality books in minutes - a service that might just be worth a few dollars.

It's almost ludicrous to argue that the eBook edition of The Lost Symbol could outsell the hardcover edition. Yes, the eBook version is currently outselling the hardcover version on Amazon. However, with 5 million copies of the hardcover version printed for the U.S. market alone, these numbers simply won't hold, especially because this is a book that will draw in a lot of readers who don't usually pick up hardcover books and don't usually buy books from Amazon but pick them up at their local Barnes & Noble, airport bookstore, or grocery store.

It's also worth noting that Amazon had been accepting pre-orders for the book for months - indeed, the pre-orders kept The Lost Symbol in Amazon's Top 100 for the last 150 days. If you own a Kindle, however, you don't need to pre-order the book as it's immediately delivered to your device anyway. Chances are that there was simply a lot of demand for the Kindle version today and most of Dan Brown's fans without a Kindle had already ordered theirs or planned to pick a copy up at a brick-and-mortar bookstore.

A Symbol of Things to Come?

That said, though, the fact that the eBook version is doing so well shows that eReaders and eBooks are on the right track. The real killer feature, here, is the instant delivery that eBooks can offer and the cheaper price (which Amazon currently subsidizes). Sure, you could leave the house and actually walk or drive to a local bookstore, but you could also get it delivered to your eReader within seconds and without ever having to get out of your pajamas. It would also be interesting to see how many of these copies end up on iPhones, but Amazon doesn't publish these numbers.

We did, however, get some interesting data from ShortCovers, a small but interesting eBook vendor who sells books in the ePub format and offers a number of mobile apps as well. For ShortCovers, the release of The Lost Symbol  meant a 2x increase in sales yesterday and the book sold more copies in one day than the Twilight series did in the last 2 months.

The demand for eBooks is picking up and is starting to reach a mainstream audience. Once the new eReaders from Plastic Logic, iRex, Asus, Sony and others become available in the next few months, the increased competition will surely drive prices for eReaders down and adoption rates up - unless, of course, Steve Jobs' prediction that nobody wants a single-purpose eReader device turns out to be right.

As Fortune's Jon Fortt, who also first wrote about this book in the iTunes store, points out, Gibson (who was last featured in Transformer's 2) wasn't alone in creating this iTunes LP - Apple actually helped Gibson out by allowing Sam Herz, a user interface engineer for the iTunes store, and Barry Munstersetiger to work on this project. According to Fortt, the two also created a number of tools that could now make creating similar projects a lot easier.

Are There Multimedia eBooks in Apple's Future?

Maybe the future that Apple sees for eBooks isn't just the static books we are used to today on eReaders like the Kindle or Sony's Readers, but multimedia eBooks that combine text, audio, and video just like Gibson's comic book. With the iTunes LP format, Apple has already developed the right format and delivery method for this - the company would just have to change the name a bit. One restriction of the current breed of iTunes LP albums is that the extras don't work on the iPhone, so it definitely takes a device with a larger display (the Apple tablet?) to really make the most out of these multimedia eBooks.

LCD Screens for an eReader?

The dual-screen display and the price seem to be the major draws that brought a lot of attention to this story this morning. The price, assuming this rumor is true, is obviously very good and the idea of having two screens is also attractive - though it might not be as practical as having a single, larger screen. In reality, though, it is hard to imagine that an eReader with an LCD screen will be able to conquer the market. Unlike e-ink screens, LCDs need a lot of energy. While you can read a few books on a Kindle without recharging, a dual-screen LCD eReader will need to be recharged far more often - unless Asus weighs it down with a large and heavy battery pack.

One advantage of using LCDs is that they basically turn the device into a small computer. According to the Times, Asus even plans to add a webcam and Wi-Fi to at least the high-end model, though the price of this device will most likely be considerably higher than $150.

$99 Is the New $199

In an earlier report, Rotman Epps argued that breaking the $199-barrier would be a major breakthrough for the eReader market and would allow these devices to become mainstream. Now it looks like $99 might actually be the point where eReader would become an impulse buy for the majority of consumers.

The good news for eReader manufacturers, however, is that those who intend to buy an eReader within the next six months are willing to pay up to $159 and those who actually already own one are even willing to pay over $250. A bargain price for eReaders for both of these groups would around $100, though.

Price Inevitably Comes Down

When it comes to consumer electronics, prices always come down in the long run, and we will surely see a similar trend for eReaders. For now, manufacturing costs for eReaders are still relatively high, but publishers could subsidize eReaders through a subscription model, for example.

It is clear, though, as Rotman Epps points out, that most consumers don't put a lot of value on these devices yet and that prices will have to come down substantially. Even then, Rotman Epps argues, eReaders will never be as popular as MP3 players because the majority of consumers "don't care enough about reading or technology to invest in this type of single-purpose device at anything close to realistic prices."