Quote:
Originally Posted by jbcohen
From what I understand one of the fundamental barriers here is that US book stores think of electronic books fundamentaly different then their dannish counter parts do. Its obvrious here that dannish book stores think of electronic books as simply anothe product they re-sell where as US book stores look at electronic books as sort of a step child. There are two halfs to a Barns and Nobles business: the book store and the electronic book store. The bricks store is considered to be the core of the business and represents the majority of the development time and budget for the company. Electronic boosk are a sort of after tought added on becuase B&N does not want to loose out on that business. That differes from Borders current strategy, post reorganization where the web site and electronic books comprise 75% of the business and is where the comapny management focuses on for development of the company. Amazon is the same thing to more of an extreem, since there are no Amazon stores the web site is the business and is where the management concentrates.
The only US company that would be remotely interested in the Danish model would most likely be BN since its the only one of the group of US book re-sellers that have physicall stores any more. And since the company is more concerned with physical store sales, a fact that I have derived from reading their anual report, they are not likely to make any additional initatives in electronic books.
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I do agree with you thoughts on how the US treats ebooks - but I would think that even online retailers would be interested in this concept (
I would think, doesn't mean that they would
). One of the major issues with ebooks (besides lending) is the inability to really gift an ebook. Currently we can give gift cards but not an actual book. The Danish model would allow customers to buy and give ebooks.