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Originally Posted by Poppaea
Pocketbook Germany sold last winter 10 times as much readers as they used to. I suspect this is true for all the other companies that are on sale here, too. Which means even if we are right now not having the number of ebook owners the US have, we will in the near future. And as Europe/Eurasia has a couple of people more and the readers available and known here are the Sonys, Pocketbooks, Bookeens, iRivers and not Kindles, it is quite sure that epub is or will be very soon the worldwide standard. The ebook shops here offer epub almost exclusivly, the libraries also.
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Of course this might happen. Or it might not...but .lrf was the de facto standard in the US until the Kindle came along; when markets are undeveloped, anything can happen.
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We are used to have a vast choice of shops to buy with and readers to choose from, with wifi and without and I can't think of the Kindle being the messiah here, were it does not have the newness it had in the States.
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The advantage of the Kindle, and the reason it was successful, was because of its integration with Amazon; this made buying books much more convenient. B&N set up a similar system, which is why they are number 2 in the US. I have no idea whether Amazon has any plans like that for Europe (or whether something like that is even possible there, due to various anti-consumer laws)...but that's what's made Amazon so successful here.
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Europeans also like the stuff they buy to be solid quality products.
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As opposed to the the rest of the world who prefers to buy shoddy products?
Everyone prefers to buy solid quality products, but the opinion as to what that is often differs. And I'm sure you probably realize that there are vast differences even between Germans and Dutch, not to mention among Poles, Italians, Greeks, Spanish, etc.
Europeans tend to buy the exact same consumer electronics we do in the US, with the only notable difference being that they pay much more for the same stuff. But I don't think that they are happy about it.
The Kindle looks and feels cheap compared to most other readers, it will be hard for it to beat a solid one, I guess.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, whatever.