Comments on: Microsoft enters the e-book wars

By: thispaceforsale

thispaceforsale — Wed, 02 May 2012 20:16:09 +0000

One of the knives on which this discussion turns is where the consumers are. With digital cameras, you don’t buy film. With ebook readers, you do purchase content, though. So a person can certainly read an ebook on an ipad or smartphone or laptop, but those devices also do other things. Which means that if a nook or kindle owner buys 40 books a year, while an ipad owner buys 5 books a year that kind of matters. Even if there are millions of ipads vs hundred of thousands of dedicated ereaders. Those numbers are completely fabricated, but reading is and always has been a niche. It would be nice if every book sold millions, but because sales are so low, where heavy readers are matters and maybe moreso than what the general public is doing over the longterm.

By: J_F

J_F — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 22:34:19 +0000

@Curmudegeon – sorry, the second paragraph was in response to Felix’s post not yours.

By: moctavio

moctavio — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:23:29 +0000

I dont think that the book reader is an efficient weapon against tablets. Only someone who makes a tablet that can compete with the iPad will ever be a threat. Why? Because the book reader business is messy, english-centric and not easily exportable to the whole world. To be able to sell books, you have to go through a minefield in every single country with copyrights, even if the language is the same. That is why the amazon model has been so slow to penetrate most countries other than english speaking ones and even those have not been easy. Thus, the ebook is a very limited weapon in these wars.

By: Ananke

Ananke — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 18:30:15 +0000

e-pub is the best format for e-books in my experience. Nook has very limited Latin only fonts BUT e-pub allows embedding fonts into the e-book file – I am using Calibry and the integration is” add book to Calibri library, transfer to your device…The font embedding is done through a script in Calibry seamlessly for the user. Hence, you can read books in Mandarin, Cyrillic, Vietnamese,etc… E-pub allows fluid text, adjusted text structure to the size of the screen, beautiful fonts, pictures, etc…Kindle format is inherently not capable of this, it is just not designed to be capable.

So, for the quality of reading that I prefer, Kindle was not an option. Nook and Sony readers were the other good hardware providers left. Sony readers were more expensive and had problems with handling mixture of DRM and non-DRM titles stored together – the reader was simply freezing.

Nook supports eBook – perfect for me, albeit not supporting txt or doc formad. It does support pdf though.

So, Microsoft got the best – they can simply integrate a book library software within Windows along with all multilingual fonts already in place within the OS and capture the entire international market. There is NOBODY even close to this opportunity. Even if Apple decides to create stand alone e-ink reader, iOS is not that native.
Microsoft doesn’t even need a single marketplace to handle the books. Of course they will add books to their own marketplace, but ALL the software is already there, and much better than any competitor.

By: GingerYellow

GingerYellow — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:55:45 +0000

What Emiliano said. Until someone invents a multi-function device that has the beneficial properties of e-ink without the drawbacks, there’s going to be a market for dedicated e-readers. An app on a tablet or smartphone is fine as a temporary means to access your library, or for reading in the dark, but it’s not a long term replacement for an e-ink device.

Also, I question how tight MS and B&N can make the integration. After all, integrating the web browser and the OS got Microsoft in a lot of trouble. I’d be amazed if there weren’t anti-trust implications for bundling the Nook store with Windows.

By: EmilianoZ

EmilianoZ — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:18:38 +0000

I also disagree with that: “…we’re not going to be buying Kindles or Nooks to read books. Just as people stopped buying cameras because they’re now just part of their phones, eventually people will just read books on their mobile device..”

The reason I read on a Kindle is that it has a non light emitting screen contrary to say an iPad. As long as I can find an e-reader with a non light emitting screen, that will be my first choice.

By: Curmudgeon

Curmudgeon — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:14:56 +0000

J_F, I wasn’t making the implicit assumption you describe. The Nook also offers excellent reading quality and long battery life (days) – it is not in any way comparable to an iPad, and is highly comparable to the lower-end Kindles.

I use the Nook for two reasons. First, it’s my library. Like the Kindle, there is also a reader for my notebook and Android phone. Second, it offers me a broad selection of reading during my travels.

Converting ePub to MOBI isn’t something that people simply wanting to read is going to appeal to.

By: J_F

J_F — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:32:29 +0000

@Curmudgeon, I’m sure you know but you can load MOBI format onto Kindle, and not very difficult to convert ePub to MOBI (although perhaps its a technical complication to far for most Kindle users).

Don’t really agree with the implicit assumption that all e-reading devices are the same. I bought Kindle because it offers excellent reading quality and really long battery life – and although i have an iPad would never chose to read a book on it. Still, its a testable hypothesis for Amazon that more book-buying customers prefer to read on an integrated tablet rather than a book-specific device, and perhaps the Kindle Fire was Amazon’s acknowledging that a pure Kindle would limit its potential market.

By: Curmudgeon

Curmudgeon — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:06:40 +0000

The reason why I went with the Nook two years ago was that it offered an open document standard (ePub), versus the Kindle’s proprietary and closed one. Sites like gutenberg.org simply couldn’t offer Kindle versions. More recently Amazon has moved to open up the Kindle format (they are starting to become available on gutenberg), but it really hurt them initially. I think many consumers bought into the Kindle early on without realizing the disadvantages of the proprietary document format.