Quote:
Originally Posted by milady133
It's not real data, I don't think we have that, but only observing the activity in forums here can give you an idea of user base, and in these forums there's a big number of people more informed on eReaders technology than the media in "the real world", so the number of outliers is bigger. Tolino is not selling outside Germany, they have perhaps a bigger user base than Kobo in Germany as they are tied to physical bookstores (although Kobo is selling also in MediaMarkt), but outside Germany there's very few people with a Tolino. Pocketbook is not even selling in physical stores, you have to buy it online, so although they sell internationally, they're not known, people buying a Pocketbook have been reading about eReaders and for some very technical reason don't want a much cheaper and known Kindle.
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And yet they are still providing cloud sync (Tolino btw is selling in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, The Netherlands and Italy and Pocketbook across Eastern Europe, Russia and former USSR states like the Ukraine).
I get the argument why smaller markets make cloud sync cheaper, whilst selling worldwide makes it more expensive, if you compare traffic and storage space you need to have.
However, if you are selling to more customers, you also make more money. Of course you don't make any money on the cloud sync itself, but you do on devices and content that you are selling. Example (hypothetical, just to illustrate the principle, please do not comment on the purely fictive specifics of this example, comment on the principle): if you sell 1,000 readers and make 10 on each device, you have 10,000 to put towards cloud sync for 1,000 customers. If you sell 100,000 devices and make 10 on each device you have 1,000,000 to put towards cloud sync for 100,000 customers. In addition, if sales of books are the same, you get additional revenue, say 5 per month, i.e. 5,000 from 1,000 customers and 500,000 from 100,000 customers for general upkeep and the servers that you have to maintain anyway, because you also use them to sell books.
From that point of view, there is no other explanation than Kobo cheaping out and fearing they might lose revenue (which is only a real problem anyway if they allow for the uploading of DRM'ed books). They already have servers set up for their book store, all the need to do is create a system that allows for the upload, conversion and integration of epubs into their system (kepub) and cloud. And then there are minimal costs incurred by downloading these books and storing them. To keep the costs in check, they could simply impose a limit on items and max. file size. Then they would have a number they could calculate with.
However, they are probably either too cheap/greedy/incompetent to offer such a service to customers.