Kobo Opens Ebook Store In UK

[Sparrow]

Reported on ITProPortal; and reviewed on the Telegraph website.

And the store is http://www.kobobooks.com/

[Bilbo1967]

Thanks Sparrow - always good to have options for purchasing e-books and that's another one to add to the list

[anurag]

The Telegraph review is scathing, titled 'Kobo e-book store makes Amazon look good':

There’s nothing much about Kobo to distinguish it from the more mainstream stores, such as Waterstone’s and WH Smith. There are a few recommended reading lists – a good way to help people ‘browse’ an online bookshop, which is otherwise very difficult – but this is nowhere near enough. As I suggested 18 months ago when I wrote about the Waterstone’s e-book store, why not be more creative with categories and help people find books they didn’t know that they wanted?

Aside from finding titles, most people’s concerns will be about price and availability. I took the seven titles listed as Just Released on Kobo’s front page and compared their price and availability at Waterstone’s, WH Smith and Amazon. Waterstone’s sells just four of the seven titles, while WH Smith sells five.

Amazon, however, stocks all seven books and sells four of them for less than Kobo. (Though Amazon books are sold in dollars, so I’ve based these prices on today’s exchange rate.)

Next I took Waterstone’s top seven sellers and compared them across the four stores. WH Smith stocks all seven but is slightly more expensive in every case. Kobo stocks just two, though those are cheaper. Once again it’s Amazon that impresses: they stock five of the seven titles and all of them cost less than at Waterstone’s or WH Smith.

I like Kobo's web UI, but I guess pricing and availability trumps everything else.

[Bilbo1967]

Do Amazon sell epub format books?

[anurag]

Originally Posted by Bilbo1967

Do Amazon sell epub format books?

No, they don't, and that's a big minus for them. Here is the last part of the Telegraph review:

This is by no means a scientific study but Amazon has come out of my two small tests very well. The downside of the Kindle remains, of course, that if you buy one, you’re committed to the Amazon store. If they lose their battle with publishers and are forced to raise prices, you’ll be stuck with them. If you decide to change to a different e-reader later on, you’ll lose your books. It’s a pretty big downside but until Amazon does the sensible thing and adopts ePub, you’ll have to decide whether you’re prepared to tolerate it.

[Bilbo1967]

Originally Posted by anurag

No, they don't, and that's a big minus for them. Here is the last part of the Telegraph review:

So Amazon is an impressive site for e-books if, and only if, you have a Kindle?

Not impressive at all then for anybody who has anything other than a Kindle. The final part of the review that you kindly quoted doesn't actually point out the corollary of what it's saying - that you can't purchase e-books from Amazon unless you have a Kindle. Pretty shoddy journalism in my opinion.

[Ben Thornton]

You can use Kindle for PC and for the iPhone and, soon enough, the iPad. Because the iPad will support, through different apps, a wide range of ebook formats, Amazon are, in my view, going to be forced to open up access to Kindle books to other formats. Otherwise they will be playing into Apple's hands by making their content available to the iPad, but not having access to other content on the Kindle.

They are at real risk of losing their grip on the book market if they insist on grasping too tightly.

[Ben Thornton]

Back OT, their selection looked a bit limited given the searches that I tried, but the prices weren't outrageous. A useful addition to the list of places to look, as has been said.

[Blue Tyson]

So it is one store for everyone - and you just are allowed to buy a different selection of books?

e.g. if I log in and try and view some I can't even see excerpts most of the time!