Barnes And Noble To Enter eBook Market?
Musing on the future of ebooks is something of a BAD IDEA office obession, and recently the format has been gaining ever more traction. The latest news is a rumor circulating that Barnes & Noble (a top US bookstore chain) is working with mobile-phone providers Sprint on a Kindle-like device.
Barnes & Noble claims to offer more titles than any other online bookstore, so the natural progression would be to make their own reader, but is this venture really going to be successful? While there’s still a sentimental attachment to paperbacks, Amazon’s Kindle is starting to make a real impact – sales are predicted to triple this year. Admittedly it’s run into some problems of late: the blind aren’t happy with the read-aloud feature, and on Amazon’s own site hundreds of readers have argued that charging more than (£6.81) $9.99 for many e-books is ridiculous. They even created a user-generated tag – “9 99boycott” for the cost of some e-books in the Amazon store that they are outraged with. People who are tech savvy have been getting things for free for far to long to pay high prices for something that is physically intangible – but the popularity of the reader is nevertheless continuing to grow.
Sony, long the poor man of the e-reader world, has teamed up with Google, who gave them access to half a million titles that are out of copyright, and thus potentially giving them the foothold they need. So it remains to be seen what old man Barnes can add to the table, even before mentioning the iPhone. Considering its functionality, the iPhone is much better value than the other devices, and its ebook app Stanza is free and offers 50,000 books.
Reading novels on mobile phones is so popular in Japan that the Nikkei business newspaper estimated the market was worth nearly 20 billion yen last year, and is in a constant growth stage, rising approximately 200 per cent a year. And it seems like newspapers are beginning to see the potential – as we discussed in a previous post even Hearst and Murdoch are working on plus-sized e-readers to send their content to. No matter how cumbersome they may end up being, it shows the belief in the format is becoming all the more fervent.
Posted by Trista Orchard in Creative Economy | April 9, 2009 1:57PM |
April 9th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
You are incorrect to state that “the blind aren’t happy with the read-aloud feature.” indeed, from all reports, people with visual handicaps are delighted with this feature. What they are unhappy with is the fact that Amazon has caved into pressure from author’s organizations and book publishers, who see this as a potential threat to the revenue generated by audio-books. Accordingly, Amazon has allowed publishers to determine, on a title-by-title basis, whether to allow the read-aloud feature to be enabled on each book.
Also, the public-domain books available on the Sony reader via Google overlap significantly with titles currently available for the Kindle for free from various sources, including Amazon.
April 14th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Sure the iPhone has an ebook reader app, but it’s still no different from a computer screen. The point of Kindle and Sony reader is the eInk screen not the file format; low cost, low power, highly readable, flexiable screens.
The real breakthrough will be when they make the devices themselves smaller than a book. I’m expecting to see Scrolls emerge as the prefered form.