Catalysts Limited

The Audit Bureau of Circulation, the gold standard for media measurement, has recently added five big digital content names to their membership. Sony's e-Reader is probably the biggest trophy in these recently-announced additions from the mobile market. Michael Lavery, ABC president and managing director, said: "Advertisers are funding mobile marketing initiatives to take advantage of the platform's immediacy, engaged audiences and location-based targeting potential." Sony is joined by Bite Sized Candy, which produces iPhone and iPod applications, Pixelmags who develop magazines and newspapers for the iPhone, Plastic Logic which will be bringing a new mobile reader to the business market next year and Scroll Motion - another iPhone developer.

Lavery added: "And we're seeing more activity from newspapers and magazines as they integrate mobile into their digital publishing plans. This includes numerous enquiries about the auditing and reporting requirements surrounding e-readers and smart phones, and about counting mobile conditions as paid circulation." Amazon, Texterity and Zinio are also ABC members.

Sony's e-Reader is also in the news following the announcement of a new model with built-in 3G wireless connectivity. Users will be able to buy books from Sony's eBook store for download direct to their reader. Sony are supporting the EPub open-source standard so owners who wish to read books in this format which are not available from the Sony store can buy them elsewhere as downloads to their PC for onward transfer to the e-Reader. The industry is waiting to see whether this wireless application will make much difference to Sony's e-Reader sales. There are interesting suggestions, however, that the market could grow significantly if educational institutions were to provide more of their text and reference books in the open-source EPub format.