10brilliant e-bookfacts

1 The first E Ink product on sale wasn’t an e-reader but a watch, made by Japanese company Seiko. Seiko also unveiled an E Ink screen with animations: something most e-readers still don’t feature

2 In May 2011, e-books outsold printed books on Amazon for the first time. There are now 2.5m books in Kindle’s store, and over 100m Kindle users worldwide – with 20m users of Kobo. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos now wants to offer every book 3 ever made. In June 2012, EL James was the first self-published author to sell a million books via Kindle. She pocketed 70% of the revenues, Amazon’s standard deal to self-publishers. 4 Five customers have called Kindle Fire’s built-in customer support asking for a bedtime story. 5 The first e-reader could only store 20 books – the newest Kindle Fire HDX holds 64,000 standard novels.

6 Fast reader? New Kindles will watch how quickly you read a page, and predict how much time you have left to finish the book.

7 The first e-book appeared in 1969, as a computer with a book (its manual), which could be read via the machine, made by Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse.

8’ Shibboleth’ – a word you can understand on Kindle. They have built-in dictionaries to define tricky words and store ones you’ve looked up in a Vocabulary Builder. They also highlight characters for a reminder of who they are. 9 650,000: the number of e-books for sale on the Kindle store at €4.90 or less. 10 Project Gutenberg has worked since 1971 to digitise old books and offer free classics as e-books on its site – the most-downloaded is Jane Austen’s

Pride And Prejudice.