[Yapyap]

Originally Posted by Rizla

As it stands, even with their comparatively small e-book sales, the European markets display greater choice of device than the US market. That's counter-intuitive.

I'd say it's the opposite of counter-intuitive.

Obviously, as pointed out before, there is no common "European market" for ebooks. There is no shop that sells ebooks in all European languages; Amazon and Kobo, the only international giants that even sell books to all of Europe at all only have books in a handful of European languages.

This means every smaller European market is left on its own, and many of the markets are so small that there is absolutely no incentive or financial reason for booksellers to develop their own "walled gardens" or proprietary ebook readers. Amazon and B&N have good economic reason for this in their primary markets - it's worth it, to them, and people have gravitated towards these large booksellers and their perfectly fine (if perhaps a bit dull but excellent quality) readers.

Here, for example, the book market is small. Paper book market is small. Last year's top ten bestsellers sold between 8300 and 6500 copies each altogether (8300 to 2400 copies each for the fiction top ten); last year's top ten ebook bestsellers (all fiction) sold between 1890 and 154 copies each. That's the entire market, covering all bookshops and booksellers.

This means there's zero reason for booksellers to come out with their own ereaders - and with watermarked epub having been adopted as the country-wide standard, that means no restrictions on devices that can be sold and bought. Basically anything out there will do, including Kindles, since watermarked epub is freely convertible (and indeed, bookshops provide links to Calibre together with basic instructions on how to convert from epub to mobi/azw3).

This means that Kindles can co-exist with Kobo, Sony, Onyx, Pocketbook, Prestigio and whatever else bookshops think they can sell (and online sellers / e-shops which don't need to keep physical stock of everything but import less frequently bought things upon ordering can offer even greater choice). There's no reason for them to prefer and advertise one product over another - it's more sensible to offer a selection, to make people feel they are offered a choice, to get them to buy an e-reader (and one from their shop) in the first place.

If the market was (much) bigger, then I imagine they'd find more incentive to come out with a branded reader and offer only that - but even so, with watermarked epub now being the country-wide standard, they'd have to be extremely confident (or achieve a monopoly) in order to go for a proprietary format and one single brand of device.