NEW YORK — A few weeks ago, Pasquale Castaldo was waiting at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport for a delayed flight, when a man sitting across from him pulled out an Amazon Kindle book-reading device.
“Gee, maybe I should think about e-books myself,” the 54-year-old Castaldo thought.
He didn’t have a Kindle, but he did have a BlackBerry. He pulled it out and looked for available applications. Sure enough, Barnes & Noble had just put up an e-reading program. Castaldo downloaded it, and within a minute, began reading Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”
As others are also discovering, the North Haven, Conn., banker found e-books quite accessible without a Kindle.
“The BlackBerry is always with me,” Castaldo said.
Thanks to ‘s Kindle, e-book sales are finally zooming, after more than a decade in the doldrums. But the pioneering device may not dominate the market for long.
As Castaldo found, many phones are now sophisticated enough, and have good enough screens, to be used as e-book reading devices. In addition, e-book reading on computers is already surprisingly popular.
E-book sales reported to the Association of American Publishers have been rising sharply since the beginning of 2008, just after the release of the Kindle. It’s the best sustained growth the industry has seen since the International Digital Publishing Forum began tracking sales in 2002 — a sign that e-books finally could be about to break into the mainstream.
The most well-known dedicated reading devices, the Kindle and Sony Corp.’s Reader, try to emulate the look of the printed page with a display technology known as “electronic ink.”
Amazon isn’t betting solely on the Kindle. It released an iPhone app for the Kindle store in March. It has snapped up some other developers of book-reading applications for smart phones, but these programs don’t use the Kindle store.
Shanna Vaughn, a university worker and voracious reader in Orange County, Calif., has been reading e-books on a computer or handheld organizer for at least 10 years, but it was only an occasional habit until she got an iPhone last year. It’s mainly the convenience that’s winning her over: Because Vaughn can buy and download books nearly instantly to the phone, she doesn’t need to plan a trip to the book store.
Vaughn, 35, is not interested in a Kindle or a Reader.
“I never really wanted something that was a single-function device. I just couldn’t see spending . . . $300 for a device where I’m sort of locked in to one retailer. Whereas my phone, that does everything.”
Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps said that while the Kindle has sparked interest in e-books, downloads of e-reading applications for smart phones have far outnumbered the Kindles sold.
