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E-books on cell phones: Apple’s still a minnow in the total phone market, compared to rivals such as Nokia
February 4, 2009 | 3:29 am
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By David Rothman
Even with millions of iPhones sold, Apple still enjoys just 1.1 percent or so of the total phone market—a speck compared to competitors like Nokia (38.6 percent).
Shouldn’t e-book-related companies work more closely and more often with the nonApples? And not just on cellphones. My Nokia Internet Tablet still can’t run Mobipocket, even a few years after the Nokia’s introduction of the Tablet. Another victim of Jeff B’s Kindle fixation (the most likely reason why even the iPhone lacks a Mobi verson)?
Not the end-all
Granted, the iPhone has a nice sharp screen, larger than on many phones. But it isn’t the be-all and end-all, particularly as use of the Android operating system grows.
The e-book opps could be huge. “Juniper Research forecasts that annual sales of smart phones will rise by some 95 percent to more than 300 million between now and 2013,” says iStockAnalyst. “The report says that by 2013 at least 23 percent of all new mobile phones will actually be smart phones.”
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Comments:
I think the biggest barrier here is the ease of getting content onto all those cellphones. It is simply too difficult for the average consumer. It is somewhat surprising that the iPhone has gained traction when it isn’t really simple to get your ebooks onto that.
Perhaps when someone solves that, and the publishers come to the party as well, we might see a surge in ebook adopters?
Mobipocket is working on getting a Java version of its reader even onto ordinary non-”smart” phones. (Doesn’t work on mine yet, alas.)
Great. I hope you can elaborate on that, Chris. Fascinating stuff. I do see a MobileRead threat. David
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25657
Not much to elaborate, really. I never got to try it out, as it didn’t work on my phone.
More information can be found here: http://www.mobipocket.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11793
I read more ebooks on my iPhone (1st gen) than I do on my Sony Reader. I’ve been using eReader from Fictionwise, but I’m now playing around with Stanza and have been really impressed with it.
To answer your question though, I do think Apple is really becoming a major force in the ebook market because of apps like Stanza. I also think Stanza is popular because it is compatible with so many formats, including epub!
You can’t blame Amazon for this one! Mobipocket has been available for the Symbian platform long before Amazon bought them, and it has continued to be updated after the Amazon purchase. It will run on all flavors of Symbian and on UIQ, also. As a matter of fact I have it on my Nokia E71 and have used it on previous Nokia phones. Mobipocket has a nice mobile site that will allow you to download books directly to the phone.
eReader is currently in beta for various Symbian releases and it works well. Unfortunately, it does not allow you to use the “bookshelf” features of Fictionwise, as the iPhone application does. I hope they incorporate this into the Symbian version eventually.
Stanza would be an ideal candidate for porting to Nokia, but it isn’t that simple. Symbian comes in a variety of flavors. They are up to Release 3, now, and each flavor requires a re-write of the program. On top of this version 3 is now up to Feature Pack 5, and each Feature Pack often requires a re-write, or at least a lot of tweaking. Symbian is not an easy language for programming and requires some special skills. The set of Symbian programmers here in the States is pretty limited (I have some fair experience with this as I was involved in porting some GPS software to the Symbian platform). On top of this, memory is at a premium in a lot of Nokia phones, even some of the expensive ones. They, until recently, even some top end phones have run with as little as 16MB free memory. This makes programming even more of a chore. Then of course we have the Symbian signing process and the cost related thereto.
As to your Internet Tablet, this was, and still is, a niche device with very low sales. Even Nokia admits this. It would not be economically feasible to port Mobipocket over to Linux just for this device. However, now with Android maybe there would be an incentive if Android penetration picks up. Remember, that Android, despite announcements by Motorola, is only available on one phone. This isn’t much incentive currently.
What is missing, here, is not the software, but the marketing. Nokia has no “app store”, though they are making some small progress in this direction. I am sure that most Nokia users have no idea that they can get Mobipocket or eReader, and there is not a good platform to let them know.
Paul, many thanks for the further details. I think it could be a chicken and egg situation in the case of the N770. With Mobi available, it would have been much more successful. Your app store idea for Nokia is excellent. As for Symbian, what percentage of Nokia phones are using that? At any rate, whatever the reason, lack of dcent marketing or lack of the right software, this has been a missed opp for both Nokia and Mobi.
Thanks,
David
Does anyone have reliable numbers for actual usage of ebooks on smartphones, most of the dataset ive seen is fuzzy math and rumors noone seams to have any hard data.
The importance of the app store might be overrated ms launched theirs about 10 years ago and to this date no one have bought software from it, it all goes directly from the web anyway, it’s only the apple lock down that make their app store so important for the iPhones.
Nokia and ebooks or on google lands you on a official download page ebook and iphone don’t. PDF’s the same story.