Publishers began to digitize their books and sell digital versions online in various formats (LIT, PRC, PDF, OeB), on their own websites or in the digital bookstores of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Palm, Mobipocket, Numilog, and the likes.
In 2004, prices of PDAs began to drop, with the leaders still being Palm, Sony and Hewlett-Packard. People began buying smartphones instead of PDAs. The first smartphone was Nokia 9210, launched as early as 2001 with a Symbian platform , and followed by Nokia Series 60, Sony Ericsson P800, and the smartphones of Motorola and Siemens. Sony stopping selling PDAs in February 2005. 3,7% of cellphones sold in 2004 were smartphones. 9% of cellphones sold in 2006 were smartphones, with 90 million smartphones sold for one billion cell phones. Apple launched the iPhone in June 2007 in the U.S., in late 2007 in Europe and in 2008 in Asia.
Would people prefer reading on mobile handsets like the iPhone 3G (with its Stanza Reader) or the T-Mobile G1 (with Google's platform Android and its reader), or would they prefer using ebook readers? Was there a market for both smartphones and ebook readers? These were some of the fascinating issues discussed at the time.
[Summary] Google launched Google Print in May 2005, followed by Google Books in August 2006, while struggling with associations of authors and publishers. The beta version of Google Print went live in May 2005, with: (a) a project aimed at publishers, launched in October 2004; and (b) a project intended for libraries, launched in December 2004. Three months later, Google Print was stopped until further notice because of lawsuits filed by associations of authors and publishers for copyright infringement. The program resumed in August 2006 under the new name of Google Books. Google Books started offering books digitized in the participating libraries (Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Oxford, California, Virginia, Wisconsin-Madison, Complutense of Madrid, and New York Public Library), with either the full text for public domain books or excerpts for copyrighted books. Other libraries joined then. Google also tried to settle a lawsuit with associations of authors and publishers in October 2008. A agreement has not be reached yet (as of July 2011).
