Gadgetopia

Bubble Bursts for E-Books: While it seems negative, there’s a positive undercurrent in this story. It’s all about expectations — they were so high for e-books that reality seemed like a failure. Now that people have had time to shift their expecations back, the market is still there, it’s just smaller. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

“She said if Penguin sold 40,000 copies of a printed book, it would typically shift 4,000 audio books of the same title and 400 e-books.

In the technological battle to find the perfect way to read electronic books on your palm-top or personal computer, competing formats have put the consumer off.

David Steinberg, president of corporate strategy and international in New York with HarperCollins, said: ‘There was a format war. They compete and are not compatible. That creates resistance.’”