Quote:
Originally Posted by TimMason
In the UK - and in France - people were talking about 'the Kindle' before you could buy one - in fact, I believe you still have to go to Amazon.com to get one - and before you could buy books for it. The store is still very restricted in its offerings outside the U.S. But it still seems to be the only ereader anyone talks about. My daily, The Guardian, is full of it - that and the iPad.
Amazon had a good, intuitive understanding of the book market from the early days. I hope they continue to maintain that understanding with ebooks.
|
The situation is different for Amazon in Europe now. Publishers and distributors are creating a market that has (thanks in part to Amazon) more visibility than it used to. They are not waiting for Amazon, and they have chosen the ePub format with Adobe DRM. If Amazon some day decides to seriously attack the European market, they will not be able to shape it the way they did in the U.S.
Right now, if you are a French customer who wants to buy a reading device and ebooks, logically you will turn to fnac, who has the largest offer at the moment. You will buy a Sony or Cybook reader and ePub e-books. When Amazon arrives on the market, you may be happy to have more choice - until you learn that you cannot read Amazon's ebooks on your Sony or Cybook.
Unless Amazon acts very quickly, they will arrive on a market where a number of people already have a reader. They may not all be ready to drop everything and buy a Kindle. I do hope that this will incite Amazon to reconsider their ridiculous closed-format policy and to offer books that can be read on various devices. Well, I can dream, can't I?
