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Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Books Clash of the Titans

Posted by Paul Constant on Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 2:04 PM

The Wall Street Journal pits Amazon against Barnes & Noble and suggests that investors should start buying B&N:

The contrast with Barnes & Noble could hardly be greater. This has been a poorly run company in many ways: The company used to dominate U.S. book sales, and had it played its cards right Amazon may never have existed. It remains a giant brick-and-mortar retailer, with nearly 800 stores around the country. That's an unhappy burden right now, as US consumers, struggling with high personal debts, curb shopping. Plus, reading is hardly a growth activity. And book sales are starting to move, albeit slowly, to electronic reading devices like the Kindle.

Much of the article is spent discussing how the Kindle, which is currently the biggest feather in Amazon's cap, could potentially go south:

The Kindle has weaknesses. Books purchased on an Amazon Kindle can only be read on a Kindle (or an iPhone). The company uses a proprietary closed format. As I've mentioned here before, it risks making the Kindle the Betamax (Bezomax?) of e-readers.

Gizmodo has a first look at what is possibly B&N's upcoming e-reader, and it looks like the Kindle might have something to worry about: It features a black and white screen on top with an iPhone-like multitouch screen beneath. Barnes & Noble will officially introduce the device next week.

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Except I can (and do) buy just about anything via Amazon, whereas B&N is just a bookstore. Unless they undercut Amazon's total costs, I'm not going to bother.

Posted by tiktok on October 14, 2009 at 2:37 PM

If the licenses for the downloads is anything like those for the Kindle, I'm not interested in this either.

Posted by Soupytwist

on October 14, 2009 at 2:41 PM

Being proprietary isn't a bad thing provided your device is best in class--ask Apple. Personally I dislike "e-reading" and prefer actual magazines and books that don't require batteries.

Posted by eric (the other one) on October 14, 2009 at 3:11 PM

The touch screen adds nothing. What they need to focus on is improving the reading experience -- the Kindle screen kind of sucks, dark grey on medium grey isn't cutting it -- and the quality of the content -- Kindle books have 1000x the number of typos, they need page numbers or some other way to index, etc.

I have a Kindle and it's an interesting adjunct to books but still a million miles away from adequately replacing them. This B&N thing addresses none of its faults.

Posted by Fnarf